Muda69

Hmm: https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/democracy/reports/2019/08/30/473911/big-pharma-reaps-profits-hurting-everyday-americans/ Yep, that is really "taking out" Big Pharma. Is he or is he not a member of the Republican Political Party? Sure seems like according to this website: https://www.gop.com/ While also refusing to significantly reduce federal spending, which only acerbates our out of control federal debt. A debt our children and grandchildren will have to deal with. Just face it, the primary reason people claim to support Mr. Trump is for one reason and one reason only: He is not <insert democratic candidate here>. And frankly that is piss poor way to choose a POTUS.

Trump's New Tariffs on Canadian Aluminum Are Indefensible https://reason.com/2020/08/07/trumps-new-tariffs-on-canadian-aluminum-are-indefensible/ More generally, the abrupt turn against a close ally and major trading partner with whom the U.S. had just signed a major trade deal signals to the rest of the world that Trump's deals aren't to be trusted. "If the U.S. walks back on its trade commitments, how can it criticize China for doing the same?" The Wall Street Journal editorial board opined today. "The aluminum tariff is Mr. Trump at his policy worst: He hurts U.S. industry and consumers, while telling America's friends that his word on trade can't be trusted." Indeed, it's difficult to find any logical explanation for why Trump would pursue a policy that will increase costs for American consumers and businesses in the middle of a major economic downturn. "These tariffs will raise costs for American manufacturers, are opposed by most U.S. aluminum producers and will draw retaliation against U.S. exports—just as they did before," said Myron Brilliant, vice president and head of international affairs for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in a statement that sums up the bizarre and counterproductive déjà vu of Thursday's announcement. Is it tone-deafness? Is it willful ignorance? Maybe a little of both, mixed with the fact that Trump is a one-trick pony who still believes—despite a two-year-long real-world experiment showing otherwise—that tariffs will fix America's economic ailments. That he would announce this new policy while literally standing on the factory floor of a business that the policy will materially harm is the cherry on top of this nonsensical milkshake. It also might be the most perfectly apt metaphor for Trump's inept and incoherent trade policy: one that he thinks is helping American manufacturing while it actually does the exact opposite.

He won't get my vote. Either will Mr. Biden for that matter. Why IYHO is Mr. Trump the best candidate for the 2020 presidential election? Because he is not a member of the democratic side of the uni-party?

Why Trump’s Losing https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/08/24/why-trumps-losing/#slide-1 Good luck.

Good question. So in all this counting of coronavirus cases does a positive test count as a "+1"? And if on a subsequent test on the same individual the test now reports as negative does that mean a "-1" on the number of coronavirus cases? Something tells me probably not..................

? Sorry, I don't recognize the reference.

Ottawa plans to retaliate after Trump imposes tariffs on aluminum https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-president-trump-announces-10-per-cent-tariff-on-canadian-aluminum/ Just what we need, a trade war with Canada...............

https://reason.com/2020/08/07/cancel-culture-is-a-dangerous-totalitarian-trend/ Spot on commentary by Mr. Greenhut. Cancel culture groupthink is spreading, and even rears it's ugly head here on the GID.

Los Angeles Will Shut Off People's Utilities For Hosting Parties, Not For Failing To Pay Their Utility Bills https://reason.com/2020/08/06/los-angeles-will-shut-off-peoples-utilities-for-hosting-parties-not-for-failing-to-pay-their-utility-bills/ Agreed. Water and electricity are yet still more businesses government needs to get out of. And this is a perfect example why.

Once the economic collapse starts I suppose Lagavulin will become quite valuable. Better stockpile some.

Pool sales skyrocket as consumers splash out on coronavirus cocoons https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-pools/pool-sales-skyrocket-as-consumers-splash-out-on-coronavirus-cocoons-idUSKCN2520HW Capitalism is great.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/ron-swanson-is-smiling/ As I have said in other threads it is smart to buy gold. And seeds. Plant the seeds and keep the gold in a safe place where you can quickly retrieve it.

Nice Video Streaming Business You Got There… https://www.cato.org/blog/nice-video-streaming-business-you-got-there Let’s not mince words: This is the Mafia’s business model. “We’ll threaten your competitor, forcing them to sell the business cheap, but we expect our cut in return.” The national security powers of the executive branch are now officially muscle for hire. But how—one might reasonably wonder—could an app best known for videos of teenagers dancing and lip-syncing pose a national security threat in the first place? A threat so dire it justifies the use of emergency powers to close down an expressive platform used by millions of Americans every day? Can a president even do that? Let’s start with the supposed threat. Like many other apps, TikTok collects quite a bit of data about its users, some obvious (such as personal profile information), some less so (device configuration; location on videos that have been geotagged). That data is stored on U.S. servers (with backups in Singapore), and the American CEO of the company’s U.S. subsidiary says they would not share it with the Chinese government. But in theory, under China’s security laws, the parent company ByteDance could be ordered to produce that data to the Chinese government for some presumptively nefarious purpose. As other analysts have noted, there is something very odd about singling out TikTok as a focus of panic on this front, as the type of personal data collected would be of relatively low intelligence value to China. (Contrast the recent compelled divestiture of the gay dating app Grindr by Chinese firm Kunlun, where there was at least an intelligible argument that the specific nature of the data collected made it uniquely useful for blackmail.) One can imagine how such information might be abused by a government interested in monitoring its own citizens, but it’s harder to articulate any coherent reason midwestern teens posting cat videos should be fearful that Maoists are scrutinizing their system settings or geotags. As long as we’re spinning hypotheticals, however, TikTok is hardly the only potential corporate source of data about Americans. The Chinese firm Lenovo is one of the largest hardware manufacturers in the world, and owns the U.S. smartphone maker Motorola Mobility. The Qingdao-based Haier Group owns GE Appliances, which sells Internet-enabled devices to the American market. Chinese gaming giant Tencent owns the company that makes League of Legends—one of the most popular games in the world for over a decade—and holds a large stake in Epic Games, developers of the more recent megahit Fortnite. It’s not clear why the data collected by TikTok, in particular, poses a greater security threat than the data collected by innumerable other Chinese-owned companies—or, for that matter, by American companies that make use of overseas call or data centers. One might reasonably respond that we should be concerned about any foreign exfiltration of data on U.S. persons. But if so, the rational response is a generally applicable data framework guided by neutral rules and principles, not the arbitrary deployment of the most extreme possible policy response against individual companies that commit the sin of becoming too popular or prominent. The disproportionate panic over TikTok seems to be substantially driven by the fact that it’s the hot new thing—heavily used by teens, which helps trigger our protective instincts—and therefore attracts media attention more readily than denunciations of foreign-owned appliance makers. And the message to foreign companies considering investing or doing business in the United States is: You may be expropriated virtually overnight, subject to the whims of the president, without having done anything wrong or violated any preexisting rule. It’s also worth noting that the argument being deployed against TikTok could just as easily be turned on the United States. Under section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the U.S. government may demand warrantless access to foreign users’ information—including private communications—from American tech companies. In 2019, a stunning 204,968 foreign persons were targeted for “collection” under that single authority. Indeed, a data sharing agreement between the United States and the European Union was recently invalidated—and its future remains uncertain—in part because the E.U. high court deemed such authority inconsistent with the privacy rights of Europeans. The logic behind a ban on TikTok works equally well as a rationale for the rest of the world to ban Google and Facebook. None of this is to deny that TikTok might present a legitimate security risk for some users. Notwithstanding the company’s assurances, democracy activists with plans to travel to China would probably be wise to avoid installing it, and government agencies that handle sensitive information would be amply justified in barring it (and many other apps) from employees’ phones. But government agencies already have and enforce their own elaborate device security policies. (Recent legislative proposals to specifically bar TikTok from government devices suggest some lawmakers mistakenly believe these agencies require granular security guidance from Congress, at the level of individual apps—an unsettling prospect, but fortunately untrue.) The government need not impose on every citizen the security measures appropriate for NSA analysts, or threaten to kick millions of Americans off an expressive platform in order to protect Naval Intelligence officers. Others worry that TikTok could serve as a vehicle for Chinese propaganda and misinformation. But as the 2016 election should have made clear, foreign governments hardly need to operate their own media platforms to engage in such information operations, and there is no good reason to think that TikTok videos pose a bigger threat on this score—whether the platform is owned by Microsoft or ByteDance—than Facebook posts. So can the president “ban” TikTok? There are a number of legal mechanisms available to the executive that might have that practical effect, though given the thin and almost entirely hypothetical nature of the “national security threat” posed, it would be a gross abuse of power to do so. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States can retroactively demand that ByteDance divest itself of TikTok. Trump could invoke the International Emergency Powers Act, declaring that the popularity of the video sharing app constitutes a “national emergency” and imposing sanctions on its parent company, which would force the Apple and Android app stores to delist the app. That would not remove it from the millions of phones on which it is already installed, however, and at least in theory the platform could continue to operate on overseas servers, both for existing users and those who access it via the Web rather than an app—a perverse result if the aim is to prevent Americans’ data from being exfiltrated to China. To truly prevent Americans from accessing a foreign platform would, ironically, require something akin to China’s “Great Firewall,” long considered an emblem of the country’s authoritarian repression of speech. However effective such a ban might ultimately be in practice, the prospect ought to be appalling from a First Amendment perspective. Again, this is a platform for expression used daily by millions of Americans. While—as with most social media—much of the content is frivolous, it has also become a vehicle for political speech and organizing. Perhaps not coincidentally, online teens, organizing primarily via TikTok, successfully pranked a recent Trump rally in Tulsa, submitting bogus registrations and inflating attendance expectations, which likely contributed to the spectacle of conspicuously empty seats that is said to have infuriated the president. It is hard not to wonder whether now that the president has announced that, absent a deal with Microsoft, he intends to attempt to shutter the entire platform for “security reasons” less than two months before a presidential election—a drastic response that would radically disrupt the legitimate speech of citizens. There may be valid data privacy concerns about foreign-owned online services that could be addressed by an appropriately general legislative framework. But killing a massively popular venue for speech by executive fiat would be, as Trump is fond of saying, a “cure worse than the problem.” In short, Trump’s threat is an egregious affront to American values on multiple levels. If Microsoft is unable to reach a deal with TikTok, the president has pledged to unilaterally use the powers of his office to destroy a vast platform for speech and expression whose users recently embarrassed him, invoking a vague and speculative “national security threat” ostensibly posed by a company that has not, as yet, been accused of any actual wrongdoing. If a deal is reached, Trump has announced that the coercion of foreign companies—coercion supposedly required by national security interests—is in fact a service to American corporations, for which the beneficiaries should pay a fee. It’s the sort of thing one might expect to see in China—not the United States. Agreed. Leave TikTok alone.

The Trump administration's "economic nationalist" agenda is little more than a cronyist attempt at propping up domestic companies with taxpayer cash. https://reason.com/2020/08/05/the-trump-administrations-765-million-kodak-deal-is-more-proof-that-economic-nationalism-is-a-scam/ Reduce the size, scope, and power of the federal government, including the Executive Branch, by at least 25% across the board and this kind of blatant cronyism goes away.

Key word "claimed". Claimed <> proof.

https://www.statesman.com/news/20200803/fact-check-is-there-difference-between-absentee-mail-in-voting

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/09/difference-between-absentee-ballots-voting-by-mail/ I guess as a libertarian I will be voting in person.

Kindergarten Cop Is Canceled, Likened to Birth of a Nation https://reason.com/2020/08/04/kindergarten-cop-is-canceled-likened-to-birth-of-a-nation/?itm_source=parsely-api In an email to Willamette Week, Leveen likened the Schwarzenegger vehicle to Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind: The Northwest Film Center wouldn't tell the Willamette Week's Matthew Singer "how much influence Leveen's comments had on its decision, but the organization did respond to her tweets directly in announcing the cancellation." Kindergarten Cop has been replaced by a second showing of John Lewis: Good Trouble, a documentary about the recently deceased congressman and civil rights leader. Other films in the series include Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Xanadu, Pee Wee's Big Adventure, and The Shining. It's a good thing that "cancel culture" doesn't exist or otherwise this would be deeply disturbing, wouldn't it? This sort of skirmish is the predictable and regrettable outcome of the politicization of everything and a totalist approach to cultural production and consumption that assumes audience members are either slack-jawed dullards who are effectively programmed by what they watch or ultra-sensitive flowers shredded by every imaginable slight. Either way, madness lies. Or maybe just a new episode of Portlandia. ....

Biden to Black Journalist: ‘Are You a Junkie?’: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/biden-to-black-journalist-are-you-a-junkie/ Unsurprisingly, many are cringing that Biden is, unprompted, asking an African-American journalist if he’s “a junkie” . . . three months after Biden told radio DJ Charlamagne tha God, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.” As noted last month, somehow the United States managed to pick its two least self-aware, sensitive, erudite septuagenarians to run for president this cycle. Yet no rage from the MSM over Mr. Biden's words. Yet the wailing and gnashing of teeth had Mr. Trump said the same thing would have been deafening.

'Do you really need to party?' WHO asks world's youth: https://news.trust.org/item/20200805120022-t4ort

Woman claims to find face mask 'cooked' into McDonald's nugget: https://www.foxnews.com/food-drink/woman-claims-face-mask-mcdonalds-nugget-report You deserve a break today...................

Maybe win a game....................

The Community Schools of Frankfort are not checking temperatures: https://4.files.edl.io/4aaf/07/27/20/204420-8090bf3a-511b-4694-8618-38f8345f4394.pdf

Why Americans Fear the COVID-19 Vaccine: https://reason.com/video/why-americans-fear-the-covid-19-vaccine/ lol. Fact-based persuasion from the government?

It is known.