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When I joined the Air Force in 1971 we were in a bad recession. It was really difficult to find work. One of the guys I went in with joined because he was married with a new baby, and no jobs were to be found anywhere. I'd been working at a drive in theater since 1968 when jobs were plentiful.
        There was no inflation, because you ordinarily don't have inflation during a recession; only a fool raises his prices when everybody is out of work. But in 1973 when I was stationed in Thailand, OPEC hit and doubled the price of oil.
        Nixon was being impeached for Watergate as oil and gasoline prices soared. The soaring oil prices caused the cost of all transportation to skyrocket, and the transportation cost is passed on to the consumer.
        Before resigning in disgrace, Nixon instituted wage and price controls, which made inflation worse for working people and ran some businesses into bankruptcy, further depressing the economy but having no or little effect on inflation.
        The only president who never won a single federal election became President. America was lucky that he stayed in office such a short time. Unfortunately, the next president wasn’t any better, making the recession worse with his talk of “malaise”.
        Reagan was elected and made life much worse for most working people when he signed the Republican congress’ bill that slashed the Capital Gains Tax, saying “a rising tide lifts all boats” despite the fact that lowering taxes on the rich isn’t a rising tide, it’s welfare for the wealthy. The tax cuts unleashed an orgy of hostile corporate takeovers that cost some people like me a good part of their wages and cost others their jobs.
        The inflation and recession didn’t subside until Clinton was elected, when oil prices stabilized and we had an economic boom. After his second term, Bush Jr, a failed oil man, was elected, along with his oil man Vice President.
        Gasoline had quadrupled in price in the two decades between 1970 and 1990, rising from a quarter to a dollar per gallon. The oil men more than quadrupled the price again in less than half the time. But this time, it didn’t cause much inflation, but crashed the economy towards the end of his second term. People had been making a choice between buying gasoline to get to work or paying the mortgage and lost their homes.
        Meanwhile, banks; actually, all big business, had gotten greedy enough to shed all semblance of morality and ethics and came up with a foolproof scheme: make mortgages available to people who looked like they could barely afford them, collect mortgage payments as high as rent would be while leaving taxes, repairs, and costs all up to the borrower, then foreclosing at the slightest mistake. That gave them the property they had loaned money for, worth more than they had loaned. It was a racket.
        Bush and Cheney had inherited a balanced budget and a booming economy with low unemployment, and left a historically huge deficit and a crashed economy. Luckily, the next president, unlike the previous, was a patriot who actually wanted the nation to do well, and avoided another Great Depression.
        Eight years later the Democrats nominated the absolutely worst presidential candidate there was, who lost the election to a man historians say was the fourth worst president, who did almost nothing about the world wide pandemic that had raged. States’ governors did his job for him and closed the country down, as leaders world-wide had done.
        Nobody drove much of anywhere, all around the world, and gasoline prices plummeted. Oil companies shut down drilling and refining. Unemployment was sky high because almost all the factories and all the bars and restaurants and most stores closed.
        Vaccines and anti-virals were developed and the pandemic waned. But we had a shortage of everything because nothing had been made for over a year. Shortages cause rising prices. The pandemic bust ended and we’re now in a historic boom, better than anything I’ve seen in my seventy years. For the first time in my life, there’s a labor shortage.
        It’s almost impossible to have a recession during times of no unemployment, but inflation is guaranteed.
        Something very similar happened a century ago, with the “Spanish Flu”, which was far less deadly than Covid. When that pandemic started, World War One was raging.
        Here’s the interesting bit: when the 1920 pandemic ended the “Roaring Twenties” started. Stop talking about recession and start talking about the second Roaring Twenties.
        But in another decade, we’ll probably be in deep economic straits like 1930.

Idiots like J-Mo aren't equipped to handle Popper's Paradox of Tolerance.

There is no paradox of tolerance. Let's recall what Popper actually wrote on the paradox:

Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.

Tolerating intolerant beliefs doesn't imply that one tolerates murder in the streets. While there may be ameliorating context outside of this paragraph, Popper commits a serious slippery slope fallacy here that tolerating intolerant beliefs then segues into tolerating physical attacks and such even though by no stretch of the imagination are they legitimate means of discourse, and then equates any flavor of intolerant belief with the subset of intolerance that settles disagreement with violence. Finally, he doesn't consider how this intolerance can be abused. I think we're seeing a taste of it today, where rival beliefs can be declared to be "intolerant" (often without regard for the content of the beliefs) and hence, fair game for preemptive intolerance.

That I think is the paradox of intolerance of intolerance. Once you do it, you and your beliefs fall solidly in the category of things against which you are supposedly intolerant. You should be intolerant of yourself and your beliefs! Not going to happen in practice, of course.

Instead a far better approach (one which I might add has been rather successful with respect to dealing with discrimination in the workplace) is to tolerate the belief, but don't tolerate the observable, harmful behavior. That eliminates most of the Orwellian facets of the Popper approach. Often it also means that you don't have to care what people believe. If someone assaults another, it doesn't matter what either of them believed (except perhaps as a means to further demonstrate guilt of the attacker in court).

Let's consider that quote a bit. First, I'm quoting it out of context so there might be some nuance I'm missing. But so has everyone else who brings it up. My rebuttal is to the bare argument, but I think that reasonable given that no one else goes any further.

The core of my rebuttal is in the paragraph after the above quote. There are three serious flaws in the quote that need to be considered. First, a slippery slope argument that assumes the presence of intolerance will eventually avalanche into widespread intolerance. A rival viewpoint here is that exposure to tolerance can make the intolerant more tolerant.

Second, there is an conflation of intolerance with violence. However, this doesn't explain cultures that are intolerant in various non-violent ways. For example, there are a variety of pacifist, isolationist religions (for example, Amish and Hutterites). They qualify as intolerant since they eschew a great of contact with the outside world, but that intolerance never rises to the level of violence, much less the "fists and pistols" of the Popper narrative.

Finally, is the whole problem with this idea, the paradox of intolerance of intolerance. Sorry, just because your bigotry is against some out-group that happens to be intolerant (or worse, wrongly perceived to be intolerant) just means that you're engaging in the very same intolerance. It's not only hypocritical, it's continuing the problem.

My take is that engagement is the better approach. Consider this. Every wacko cult follows similar playbooks: they isolate their followers from the rest of the world so that everyone is in the same screwy environment. Only the true believers are allowed to interact with the outside world in any way. Many other intolerant beliefs operate in the same way - creating an "us versus them" mythology, echo chambers, and similar means to cut off the believers from exposure to experiences that could undermine the beliefs. The strategy of intolerance versus such believers enforces this isolation. It makes the problems of intolerance worse.

So not only is the paradox of tolerance critically flawed on multiple levels, it makes the basic problem of intolerance worse.

I bought the hardcover edition of The 1619 Project. It is very well-written for a scholarly work, and after the first chapter I had already learned quite a bit.
        However, its editing was abysmal, such a horrible job I wondered if it was edited at all. Its editor was embarrassingly incompetent. By the end of the first chapter I had already found three errors. The first was a homophonic spelling error; of course, spell checkers can’t catch them. “Basis” was spelled “bases”. Oddly, I found no errors after the first chapter except the continuation of one of them.
        The second error was grammatical and appears to be repeated throughout the book. A race’s name, like Caucasian, Hispanic, etc. should be capitalized. The Black race is capitalized in the book, but not the White race. This simple grammar error will lead many readers to believe that the author is a racist! Abysmal.
        These types of errors hinder comprehension. On page 116 it reads “...a fresh wave of white terrorism…” which when dissected suggests that there is actually a good form of terrorism. It should have read “...a fresh wave of White terrorism…” leaving no doubt that this was evil terrorism by White people, not some kind of good terrorism.
        The third error, on page 38 is two run-on words; “shall be” was printed “shallbe”. It quoted an old text, and if that is how the original text was written, it should have been followed by “[sic]” or simply corrected.
        My education was in the visual arts (handy for cover design), and the closest thing to a college level English or writing class I took was one on verbal logic. Any writing skills I possess were learned by example; I’ve probably read tens of thousands of books, some very well written and some had terrible writing. An example is True Grit, one of only two poorly written books I’ve read that the movie was much better than; in this case, both movies. It was a good story, poorly written.
        When I say 1619 was well-written, I mean for a scholarly work. I worked with government scientists for decades and read a lot of scientific and government reports. They were all horribly written. One in particular stands out in my memory decades later: a paper with various forms of the word “enumerate” a dozen times in the first paragraph, without once using the word “count”.
        I saw the excellent movie We Were Soldiers, and since the book a movie's script is from is almost always better, I bought the book. Its writing was almost as bad as a government report; the writing followed all of the rules and was still abysmal. It’s hard to imagine a war story that can be boring, but that one was. I shelved it after forty pages.
        1619 is slightly better written than the average college textbook, but every bit as informative as any textbook I’ve ever read. It’s obvious its writer is an avid reader, but as nonfiction texts go, she’s no Isaac Asimov. He himself, my favorite writer, was no Stephen King.
        Halfway through the book I realized where the noise about “critical race theory”, something that is only taught in law school, came from. What the racist right calls “CRT” is really this book. As former US Vice President Al Gore might say, it is full of inconvenient truths that are either missing or glossed over in public school history classes.
        When I was in public school, the treatment of the indigenous peoples of the Americas wasn’t really mentioned; maybe two sentences about the Trail of Tears. 1619 has a long chapter about how horrible our treatment of them was, especially under President Jackson, a truly evil man.
        It appears that in this century they’re at least starting to teach about slavery in grade school. When my youngest daughter was eight or ten, her best friend was a black girl who lived in the neighborhood, whom she had gone to school with since first grade. When they learned about slavery, Patty asked her friend how could she not hate White people? Navisha answered that it was White people who freed her ancestors from slavery.
        But it’s easy to see how 1619, better known as “CRT”, would make it look as if every White person in history was evil, because of what 1619 leaves out. When Patty told me that, I informed her that on my mom’s side of my family, there were abolitionists who started the underground railroad. The book mentions Harriot Tubman, and from the book you might think that the railroad was an all Black thing. Of course, it couldn’t be, the safe houses were all owned by Whites, the only way it could work. Jones would have you think that every White person in history was an evil racist, including Abraham Lincoln. The truth is that we all have evil in us.
        Ms. Jones barely touched on classism, which is what racism is based on. India has had institutional classism for its entire history. Its “untouchables” were America’s Blacks. She mentioned our racial hierarchies without mentioning class at all, and both racism and classism is because of money.
        Both racism and classism go all the way back to our prehistoric roots, as does slavery and all other evils. The Jewish Torah, the Muslim Quran, and the Christian Bible all document the Egyptians’ enslavement of the Jewish people, who have been hated by racists for millennia and probably since Moses himselve's children.
        All in all, it's an excellent book. I especially think every White racist in America should be forced to read it, at gunpoint if necessary.

This one is really old, but never published. The TuneIn app was discontinued years ago.

        Weird—Yesterday I was listening to KSHE and the TuneIn app stopped, which isn’t weird at all. Especially on the TV, although that app gives me trouble on the tablet once in a while, too.
        So I opened it on the big tablet and it worked there. But when I went to use the “cast” function on the tablet to put the picture and sound on the TV, the tablet reported “no nearby devices found”.
        That had happened once before when internet was being screwy. So I turned on the big laptop, which is plugged in to the TV, opened a browser and KSHE was on again. I had a minor mystery. I got out the little laptop to work on a story.
        Later I decided to watch Star Trek so I hit the TV’s Netflix button. It said I wasn’t on the network, that I needed to plug in a cable or set up WI-fi, only the cable was, in fact, plugged in.
        When the TV acts up, rebooting usually fixes the problem like any other computer, so I unplugged it; the only way to reboot it (I’ve since found an obscure menu item that is sometimes unreachable).
        But this time a reboot didn’t solve it, again it said it wasn’t on the network. So I rebooted the router, unplugged the TV again, unplugged the network cable, restarted the TV, and hit the Netflix button. Of course it said it wasn’t on the network, because this time it really wasn’t. So I plugged the network cable in again, expecting to be on the internet, but absolutely nothing happened.
        I scratched my head all day trying to figure it out and never could. I suspected it was Comcast (I’m on AT&T fiber now) shenanigans, now that there’s no Net Neutrality (thanks, assholes).
        This morning I hit the Netflix button by mistake, and Netflix came up! Checked TuneIn, and that now works, too. The only answer I can come up with is it must be related in some way to the thunderstorm and power outage Friday night.

"Through confidential sources, undercover agents, and clandestine recordings," the Justice Department announced in October 2020, "law enforcement learned particular individuals were planning to kidnap" Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and "acting in furtherance of that plan." But it turned out those individuals included the government's "confidential sources," who pushed the half-baked scheme and orchestrated acts "in furtherance of that plan" even when the defendants resisted it.

The appearance of entrapment, coupled with the difficulty of distinguishing between fantasy and criminal conspiracy, explains the embarrassing outcome of a federal trial that ended last week, when jurors acquitted two alleged conspirators and failed to reach verdicts for the other two. It was a well-deserved rebuke of investigative methods that crossed the line between prevention and invention.

Two of the six original defendants, Ty Garbin and Kaleb Franks, pleaded guilty and testified for the prosecution, saying they willingly participated in the kidnapping plot. But the record compiled by the government shows FBI agents and their informants were determined to advance a narrative that would justify their efforts.

Remember how I repeatedly warned about historical entrapment schemes by the FBI? This outcome is why. Even with two alleged co-conspirators pleading guilty and testifying against the rest as well as the testimony of four informants and undercover officers, they still couldn't make the charges stick against anyone.

They can retry the remaining two, but it's not going to look good when two cohorts have been acquitted of similar charges.

And as I noted, this same sort of problem holds for the would-be insurrectionists of January 6. It's much of the same failed tactics, particularly in relying on people to testify in exchange for lighter sentences.

Another example is the Rittenhouse trial which blatantly ignored the obvious self-defense argument. Unfortunately for the prosecution in that trial, the jury didn't ignore it as well.

It's time to understand why these high profile court cases didn't succeed as expected. The big one is a disregard for law. It's not merely incompetence. These trials are showboating and we see the consequences of that, such as the above lack of convictions.

[Pav:] You don't seem to want to realise no mainstream source will ever give you a reason to believe anything that would make you less willing to pay taxes to defence companies. Perhaps you own some shares, or feel you benefit in some other way? I suppose it IS within the realm of possibility, though only by cosmic accident. It IS strangely fascinating and amusing talking to someone who is a true believer in the broken window fallacy (probably in the form of post WWII parables).

If you look at Pav's other postings on this, it's a remarkable dysfunctional chain of this crap. Even when he cites links, not a one supports his claims. For example:

[Pav:] Right.

This post contains Pav's defective arguments in a nutshell. It's just a story about the Ukrainian Prime Minister whining about his allies' statements with counterwhining from sources associated with the allies. What we actually had been speaking about at that point in the thread was violence, psychopaths, and corrupt oligarchs, none of which found their way into Pav's source.

Here's another example. MSNBC gets photobombed (they showed uncritically neo-nazi symbols on the uniforms of the soldiers involved in the video) by the Azov Battallion, which a genuine neo-nazi military unit in the Ukrainian military. So what? This is far from the first time covert product placement has been a thing in military news.

Another example is a blogger link from this post. It's just a few pages of pulling stuff out of the author's ass confidently. For example:

Ukraine’s President Zelensky told visiting US Senators in early June that the country’s military defense against Russia and the completion of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline are inextricably intertwined.

Once the project is completed, Ukraine will be deprived of the funds required to fund defense spending and defend Europe’s eastern border.

“Nord Stream 2 will cut Ukraine off from gas supplies, which will cost us at least USD 3 billion per year.”

Zelensky, always the joker, wants Russia to pay $3 billion per year so he personally can defend Europe from Russia who is paying him.

Notice how the author smoothly transitions from a fact - that Zelensky stated that closing a particular pipeline would cost the Ukraine a lot of money - to the unsubstantiated claim that Zelensky then wants Russia to pay for it. This is then further logically mangled into the idea that it somehow explains the Ukraine-Russian friction we're seeing now.

Zelensky’s Ukraine is shuffling Europe, NATO, and the US closer and closer to the line where one mistake in diplomacy, one stupid move by any of Ukraine’s infamous Neanderthal nationalist volunteers, and bang!

Let us further note that such infamy is only on the Russian supporters side. Somehow everyone else has come to grips with the reality that there's a small number of fascists/neo-nazis in the Ukraine military. My favorite quote of this batch:

In response to this, Ukraine mobilized over ½ its army or over 170,000 troops to the frontline with all the heavy weapons at its disposal accompanying them.

This force was a supposed counter to the Russian invasion army, which again, was just over the border.

In reality, the Russian army staged planned war games near the city of Yelnya, 160 miles (257 kilometers) from the Ukrainian border. You read that right, the Russian army was160 miles away from the Ukrainian border even though every major western publication made it sound like they were already in Kiev.

As I noted at the time, now those "war games" are inside the borders of the Ukraine. Looks like the Ukraine was right on that one!

While I didn't say it at the time, if the author is so horribly wrong about the "war games" and the infamy of Ukrainian troops what else is he horribly wrong about? This isn't the alternate media source I'm looking for.

Then there's the king of one liner putdowns:

[fustakrakich:] "Your" take is just mass media propaganda. Nobody wants war but the US

And yet we see Russia making those aggressive moves towards war. It also furthers the propaganda narrative that this is merely a showdown between Russia and US with Ukraine interests being completely irrelevant.

Also that Runaway journal was about some academic blaming the US or possibly the Western world for the conflict. At one point Runaway claimed:

[Runaway1956:] You didn't listen to the man, did ya? The "west" engineered that coup. Mearsheimer doesn't say so, but I'm aware that the Koch brothers were prime movers in the coup. We quite literally backed fascists and neo-Nazis in the coup.

In other words, there was no support for Runaway's assertion there from his source. In fact, I've googled this subject a bit and never found Runaway linking to a source for the Koch brothers accusation - though if he had, I would have stated that it shows good taste in revolutions on their part.

Anyway, I think this illustrates some of the weirder failures of the pro-Russian side in this conflict. Namely, obsessing over sources of evidence rather than the evidence itself. But given how unflattering that evidence is, maybe this is the best they can do?

All I can say is that it's probably a lot safer to complain about media bias than to defend Putin only to have him stab you in the back a few weeks later. But it begs the question: why is imaginary CIA/MIC involvement enough to completely torpedo a media source, but not being horribly wrong and/or irrelevant?

Using powers granted under the Emergencies Act, the federal government has directed banks and other financial institutions to stop doing business with people associated with the anti-vaccine mandate convoy occupying the nation's capital.

According to the regulations published late Tuesday, financial institutions are required to monitor and halt all transactions that funnel money to demonstrators — a measure designed to cut off funding to a well-financed protest that has taken over large swaths of Ottawa's downtown core.

"Financial institutions" aren't just banks.

The government is also ordering insurance companies to suspend policies on vehicles that are part of an unlawful "public assembly."

These financial institutions can't handle cash, issue a loan, extend a mortgage or more generally facilitate "any transaction" of a "designated person" while the Emergencies Act is in place.

The regulations define a "designated person" who can be cut off from financial services as someone who is "directly or indirectly" participating in a "public assembly that may reasonably be expected to lead to a breach of the peace," or a person engaging in "serious interference with trade" or "critical infrastructure."

So basically, the Canadian government chickened out and mandated instead that the banks and insurance companies to do everything. Then rat out their customers to the government once they're done.

Banks also are required to "disclose without delay" the "existence of property in their possession or control" or "any information about a transaction or proposed transaction" related to a "designated person" to both the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).

"Those authorities are now in force and they're being used," said Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino. "It's incredibly important that we follow the money."

It's not "incredibly important" for anyone interested in rule of law, due process, or proportionality of punishment. And the final part:

The Emergencies Act and its associated regulations are in effect for only 30 days; that period could be shorter if Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his cabinet revoke it or if Parliament scuttles it after a vote. But a senior government official said there could be long-term implications.

"For the most part, financial institutions can decide who they do business with and they may decide to cease offering financial services," the official said.

Mark Blumberg is a lawyer at Blumberg Segal LLP who specializes in non-profit and charity law. In an interview, he said that while the Emergencies Act gives banks time-limited powers, these institutions "may just decide to shut the person's account down" because there could be "huge risks" for banks servicing these customers in the future.

So rather than deal with the protest in a sensible manner (they're breaking the law, right?), the Canadian government has put forward this ridiculous "emergency" and deputized a bunch of businesses to go crazy with legal immunity (but only if they toe the government line). In the meantime, the protesters can lose their insurance and freeze finances. So what's going to happen to protesters of any sort in the future, if banks and insurance companies see them as liabilities due to this emergency?

Now imagine if Trump and US financial institutions had this kind of power over BLM protesters. Wouldn't be a problem, right?

Hopefully, this will get reversed in the Canadian courts, because otherwise it's a huge move towards tyranny, particularly of the fascist sort.