CNN Donny is here to tell us how to be “realistic about God and the Bible.”
I love the fact that gay Don Lemon fancies himself a Bible scholar now.
I hate to break it to Dr. Lemon, M.Div., but as the tweeter said, Jesus was a Jew. I mean I thought everyone knew that. Right?
What the heck is going on.
The booming technology trade that helped lift the market to new highs during the pandemic continues to unwind Thursday as Treasury yields spike further on dovish comments from the Federal Reserve, which experts believe could be fueling concerns over rising inflation and lower stock-market valuations.
“Yields are surging this morning as the Fed threw caution to the wind and kept policy at max accommodation despite the markedly improved macro backdrop,” Vital Knowledge Media Founder Adam Crisafulli said in a note Thursday. “The market’s reaction with regards to the Fed is evolving–a dovish, or accommodative, stance being positive has defined the equity relationship to monetary policy for years, but that no longer may be appropriate as accommodation fuels inflation expectations and drives yields higher, thus undercutting the S&P’s multiple.”
Yields on the 10-year Treasury have soared more than 125 basis points since their pandemic low in July. Higher returns on the risk-free asset class have heightened concerns over sky-high tech valuations and pushed the Nasdaq down about 5% from a February high. Over the same period, the S&P is up about 0.5%, and the Dow has soared more than 5%. The Fed on Wednesday said it expects the economy to run hot this year, with projected GDP growth of 6.5% (compared to a 3.5% decline last year) and year-end unemployment of 4.5% (compared to 6.2% last month). To help bolster that growth, the central bank says it will leave the Federal Funds rate near 0%.
The New York Times once called former President Barack Obama the “Regulator in Chief,” so why would his administration pass up the chance to regulate Big Tech a decade ago?
“Once a presidential candidate with deep misgivings about executive power, Mr. Obama will leave the White House as one of the most prolific authors of major regulations in presidential history,” The Times said about him in August 2016, citing his “560 major regulations” passed in his first seven years in office.
But despite those hundreds of regulations in Obama’s legacy, the administration let Google amass unchecked power by committing key errors in its investigation and letting the company off the hook, a 312-page cache of confidential internal Federal Trade Commission documents published Tuesday by Politico revealed.
After opening an antitrust probe and spending 19 months investigating, the FTC commissioners voted 5-0 to close the case without further action in January 2013.
Notably, four out of five of those were Obama appointees.
Investigators discounted the potential of revenue from targeted ads and miscalculated the role smartphones would play both in Google’s ability to dominate the market with its Android operating system and customers’ preference for using their smartphones that unfairly advantaged its search engine.
In fact, the customer review company Yelp testified that 92 percent of its traffic came from Google, and shopping sites like eBay and TheFind similarly reported that more than two-thirds of their referrals came from the search engine, exemplifying how these companies relied too heavily on one search engine for the majority of their business.
The FTC also failed to penalize Google for its intentional algorithmic change that funneled traffic away from competitors to its own sites in a decision that later prompted the U.S. Department of Justice to file an antitrust lawsuit in October.
Jon Leibowitz, then the FTC chair, told reporters at the time of the probe there was “some evidence” Google had done this, but that ultimately “on balance we did not believe that the evidence supported an FTC challenge to this aspect of Google’s business under American law.”
The memos also revealed that the FTC attorneys were in favor of regulation, but that ultimately the commission decided to leave Google alone based on the economists’ recommendations — with only a “voluntary commitment” from Google to make their algorithm fairer.
It appeared that investigators understood that Google was moving toward a monopoly on the ad, search engine and smartphone fronts, but either didn’t understand or didn’t care that the company would be free to gobble up market share with so few impediments.
To date, Google is now embroiled in three massive antitrust lawsuits that would have been avoided if the FTC had clipped its wings back in 2013, according to The Times.
Google responded to Politico’s revelations, calling it “old news” in a statement to the news outlet.
“A bipartisan FTC voted unanimously to close its investigation into Google nearly a decade ago — supported by recommendations by all of the FTC divisions including the Bureau of Competition, the Bureau of Economics and the Office of General Counsel,” Google spokesman Peter Schottenfels said.
“In closing its investigation, the FTC stated that our changes to Google Search were procompetitive and benefited consumers,” he added.
“And in the eight years since, competition in search has only increased as people have more ways than ever to access information online, including through an array of dedicated mobile apps.”
These recent revelations have lawmakers calling for action, including Colorado Rep. Ken Buck, the highest-ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust panel.
“The Obama/Biden Administration let Google off the hook and allowed them to continue to expand until they became a monopoly,” he tweeted.
“Congress must act now to rein in the power of Google and Big Tech.”
Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri called for an overhaul to the FTC, saying in a statement the FTC “lacks teeth” and expressed support for closing the “revolving door” between the commission and the companies it investigates.
That revolving door is a big problem, as The Intercept reported that nearly 250 people moved back and forth between the White House and the tech giant during the Obama administration, including one of the commissioners who now works for a law firm that has represented Google.
It’s possible that it was regulators’ lack of foresight that allowed Google to escape the probe unscathed, but the closeness between the Democratic administration and the company may have something to do with it.
In addition, it’s probable that the lovefest will continue since employees at tech companies like Google, Amazon, Apple and others donated more than $15.1 million to President Joe Biden.
Meanwhile, Twitter and Facebook have blocked news articles unfriendly to Democrats and even silenced former President Donald Trump while he was still a sitting president.
The Obama administration missed this opportunity, and either by commission or omission allowed Google’s parent company to grow unchecked into the $1 trillion powerhouse it is today.
The symbiotic relationship between Big Tech and government is hard to ignore and dismiss in light of the information revealed this week. Whether it continues this way is still unknown.
Dr. Anthony Fauci has served as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984 and is currently the highest-paid United States federal government employee. Fauci has run point on the federal government’s response to the Coronavirus outbreak as the national small business economy has suffered massive damage due to oppressive government lockdowns. Mullis, who died in 2019, was on to Fauci’s duplicity years ago.
Kary Mullis stated in a resurfaced video interview: “Guys like Fauci get up there and start talking, you know, he doesn’t know anything really about anything and I’d say that to his face. Nothing. The man thinks you can take a blood sample and stick it in an electron microscope and if it’s got a virus in there you’ll know it. He doesn’t understand electron microscopy and he doesn’t understand medicine and he should not be in a position like he’s in. Most of those guys up there on the top are just total administrative people and they don’t know anything about what’s going on in the body. You know, those guys have got an agenda, which is not what we would like them to have being that we pay for them to take care of our health in some way. They’ve got a personal kind of agenda. They make up their own rules as they go. They change them when they want to. And they smugly, like Tony Fauci does not mind going on television in front of the people who pay his salary and lie directly into the camera,” Kary Mullis said.
Kary Mullis admitted in separate remarks that with a PCR test “you can find almost anything in anybody” and “It doesn’t tell you that you’re sick.”
In an obscure video resurfaced during the Coronavirus meltdown, Mullis said that “with PCR if you do it well you can find almost anything in anybody. It starts making you believe in the sort of Buddhist notion that everything is contained in everything else, right? Because if you can amplify one single molecule up to something that you can really measure, which PCR can do, then there’s just very few molecules that you don’t have at least one single one of them in your body.”
“PCR is separate from that, it’s just a process that’s used to make a whole lot of something out of something. That’s what it is. It doesn’t tell you that you’re sick and it doesn’t tell you that the thing you ended up with really was going to hurt you or anything like that,” Mullis said.
Read the full article here.
West Point is requiring students to read textbooks with titles such as Critical Race Theory: An Introduction and A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory.
‘Critical Theory’ is a philosophy rooted in Marxism, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Critical Theory has a narrow and a broad meaning in philosophy and in the history of the social sciences. “Critical Theory” in the narrow sense designates several generations of German philosophers and social theorists in the Western European Marxist tradition known as the Frankfurt School.
The Wall Street Journal estimates Marxism has led to the deaths of 100 million people, making Marxist communism “the greatest catastrophe in human history.”
American philosopher and theologian Norman Geisler puts Marxism’s death toll at a staggering 1 billion. “The implementation of Marx’s ideas and spirit has killed more people than the bubonic plague, the imperialism of Genghis Khan, European colonialism, and both world wars combined,” says Geisler.
But this hasn’t stopped West Point from teaching Critical Theory—the newest strain of Marx’s deadly ideology—to its students.
The Discovery Institute’s Chris Rufo tweeted that Critical Theory is in fact part of the United States Military Academy’s leadership curriculum:
Rod Dreher at The American Conservative received the following email from a West Point alumnus, whose identity is being protected:
I hate to pile on to the theme of academics at prominent universities attempting to shut down intellectual inquiry in the name of anti racism, but this is another example of the trend that needs some wider exposure. The Left wing mob is coming for the service academies, and by extension, our nation’s very ability to defend itself from external enemies. As a West Point graduate (class of 2017) and a longtime reader of your blog, I thought I should bring this to your attention as yet another example of the madness that is afflicting our country’s elite classes.
This letter needs some background explanation. It’s not like the Princeton Putsch that you described. The faculty at West Point are probably the most conservative of any public university in the country. I can attest to the academic openness and respect for free debate during my time at the school (2013-2017). The student body is (or was) generally conservative in an institutional sense. They are not right-wing fire-breathers. Cadets were pretty evenly divided about Donald Trump’s election. From what I could observe, so were the faculty. The Academy’s response to the unrest that has torn the United States apart in the last few months–spearheaded, I might add, by Lieutenant General Darryl Williams, the Academy’s first black Superintendent–was measured and appropriate for the amount of division in our country. This is not an attempt by people currently in power to shut down debate by other academics.
It is quite the opposite. It is an effort by young leaders in the United States Army to force the Academy to bow to the Woke Cult and make the Anti-Racism the central feature of the Academy’s curriculum. This policy statement was apparently drafted by a group of recent Academy graduates (classes of 2018 and 2019). These graduates all came from the top tier of the ranks of the Academy’s cadet leaders. Two recent valedictorians and First Captains signed this manifesto. (Other past First Captains include Douglas MacArthur, John J. Pershing, and William C. Westmoreland.) The other cadets all held high-ranking positions within the Corps of Cadets. They are the cream of the crop of the Army’s future leaders, the guys and gals that will become generals one day and will be expected to lead America’s sons and daughters in combat.
Their actions are akin to those of the Red Guards in Maoist China. They are agitating to tear the Academy apart from the ground up and reorient its mission around Anti-Racism. The fact that our country’s future leaders believe in this nonsense is a sign that our military is in trouble, and cannot be relied upon either to defend our country or to safeguard the interests of all Americans in the performance of their duties.I don’t expect you to read this entire document or understand completely what’s going on here, but the plain English of it is easy enough for everyone to understand. Even so, I’ll add in a few notes for context on this document.
I knew some of these cadets personally and professionally in the performance of my duties, but not well enough to be able to speculate about their motives. The document is filled with concrete policy proposals to address what its authors see as a major problem at West Point. The effect of these policy proposals is to cede control of the Academy’s entire curriculum from the ground up to black cadets in the name of Anti-Racism. It is replete with so-called ‘examples’ of racism at the Academy, but most fall apart on close inspection. Minimally they do not substantiate the charge that West Point needs to be fundamentally reformed to address it. I interpret most of these anecdotes as pure innuendo and hearsay, totally devoid of context, and not indicative of an institutional problem (they were nearly all sourced from an online anonymous survey). They would not pass muster for any journalist attempting to investigate them. It is filled with buzzwords about ‘heteronormativity’, ‘Protestants’, ‘imperialism’, ‘Christianity,’ ‘white supremacy’, ‘Black bodies,’ and the like. I doubt that the writers of this document know anything at all about any of these things, but of course that will not abate their righteousness in pursuit of their holy cause.
This document as a whole constitutes wholesale moral blackmail of the Academy, its graduates, and its present-day leadership. It consists almost entirely of a recitation of black grievances against whites, with a few token gestures to ‘Latinx’ and ‘Asian’ minorities, but nothing more, probably because it didn’t occur to the writers of this document that there might be more to American history than their single-minded focus on racism. I should note that the Academy is currently led by a black man (LTG Williams, himself a graduate with many years of honorable service) and that the Corps of Cadets itself has been led by black people (Simone Askew in 2018 and EJ Coleman in 2016) twice in the last five years. Black cadets are represented at the Academy in greater numbers than their proportion of the population. Of course, none of this is enough for the Woke Mob.
Do not take comfort in the security which has hitherto been afforded to our nation by our armed forces. We have not been tested against a real enemy in many generations. When we are, leaders like this will not be able to stand in the field of battle. You have been warned.
Suggested reading: ‘West Point & Critical Race Theory’
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki got a slip of the tongue after she called the situation at the border a “crisis.” On Thursday, Psaki used the term when she responded to a question about whether Mexico has any expectations on the Biden administration’s handling of the migrant surge at the border.
“There have been expectations set outside of — unrelated to — any vaccine doses or requests for them that would be partners in dealing with the crisis at the border,” Psaki stated.
The administration has downplayed the problems at the southern border, including the massive migrant influx since Joe Biden took office. When called out for dubbing it a crisis, Psaki claimed she meant to say “challenges” at the border.
“When you were talking a moment ago, about diplomatic negotiations between the United States and Mexico you said ‘crisis on the border’ was that…?” a reporter questioned.
Psaki attempted to quickly recover by stating “challenges on the border” in response. In the meantime, the Biden administration has repeatedly promised to implement a more humane immigration policy despite growing concerns about the conditions unaccompanied migrant children have faced in border facilities.
Facebook’s drive to register 4.5 million voters swayed the November election to President Joe Biden, a Facebook executive opined in hidden camera footage.
The executive, Benny Thomas, expressed grim views of the giant tech company, but counted the voter drive among its positives while secretly being recorded earlier this year by reporters with Project Veritas, an undercover journalism nonprofit.
“This is the good side of Facebook. … We made a big difference,” he said in a video released by Veritas on March 16, explaining that Facebook exceeded its goal of registering 4 million people and could only accomplish the task because of its “sheer scale and reach.”
“Yeah. I’m pretty sure we [Biden] won that way,” the reporter said.
“Yea!” Thomas replied, laughing. “Exactly!”
“What do you think?” the reporter jumped in.
“Exactly. I think so too,” he said.
Thomas’s LinkedIn profile describes his position as Global Planning Lead – Creative & Experiential at Facebook since September 2019.
Facebook didn’t immediately respond to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.
Thomas suggested to one of the reporters that Facebook needs to do more to control speech on its platforms.
“People are believing whatever they see, and it’s just causing a crisis,” he said in another video published by Veritas on March 15.
When asked about his views on solutions, he said, “The answer is just more controls, more safeguards. … To give people a guide to behavior.”
Behavior needs to be kept in check through surveillance, he suggested.
“That’s called democracy. Somebody is always watching you so that you behave well,” he said.
On the other hand, he acknowledged that Facebook’s judgments are necessarily biased, even when machine-driven.
“There’s always built-in bias because this is the myth that computer programmers told us, which is, ‘Oh, these are computers, computers don’t have bias.’ But guess what? Human beings wrote that code. And that human being has bias.”
Conservatives and some liberals have long complained that Facebook is censoring political speech based on vague, partly secret, ever-changing, and unevenly enforced policies.
Thomas also said Facebook and Google have grown so powerful, they need to be broken up.
“The government needs to step in and break up Google and Facebook. I’ll make less money, but it’s a better thing for the world,” he said.
Facebook needs to be stripped of its major subsidiaries, he suggested.
“Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, Oculus, WhatsApp. They all need to be separate companies. It’s too much power when they’re all one together,” he said.
“It needs to be broken up the way the telecom companies were broken up and the oil companies were broken up. But better than that, because those guys just came back together pretty soon after that. I hope we’ve learned from that. But that’s really the one thing, as you said, I would break it up, and I would remove Zuck [Mark Zuckerberg] as the CEO.”
Facebook’s power ceases to be innocuous, he said, “when you weaponize it as a politician and you go, ‘Tell me, show me people who are racist,’” such as when “a racist politician” is looking to target messaging to “several racists who will vote” for him.
When the reporter asked who would decide what makes one a racist and how would Facebook determine it, Thomas mused, “What would be a proxy for a racist?”
“Lives in all-white town, education, religious preference,” he said. “So you can triangulate three or four data points and say, ‘She’s likely to be racist.’”
Thomas also criticized Zuckerberg’s investment in gene-editing technology.
“It’s eugenics. I don’t know any way to stop it. I think the genie’s out of the bottle,” he said.
He worries the technology would lead to the development of a “superior race” of people and extreme polarization of society into “haves” and “have-nots” that goes beyond mere wealth differences.
“They have a thing that I can never have,” he said, describing the position of the “have-nots.”
When confronted by one of the reporters, Thomas refused to go on record and clarify his comments.
