90 Miles From Tyranny

Wednesday, May 16, 2018

Bibi Smash! Netanyahu Pushes Back on CBS Anchor Critical of Israel

In addition to siding with violent Palestinian border assaultersduring Tuesday’s CBS Evening News, the network had anchor Jeff Glor sit down with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu where he tried to grill the leader on his county’s military response. But despite Glor’s best efforts, Netanyahu schooled him on what it was like to be a country surrounded by enemies that want to see you destroyed.

“Looking back on yesterday, especially Gaza, anything you would have done differently,” Glor wondered, obviously referring to the unverifiable casualty count provided by the Palestinians. Netanyahu said he wished it “wouldn't have happened at all” and explained how Hamas was incentivizing people to go with money. Glor seemed shocked:

GLOR: You said they're paying them?
NETANYAHU: Yes.
GLOR: To try to cross the border?
NETANYAHU: Hamas is paying these people who are coming there.

If he didn’t understand that, it might blow Glor’s mind to learn that Hamas actually pays the families of their suicide terrorists too. “They're pushing civilians, women, children into the line of fire with the view of getting casualties. We try to minimize casualties. They're trying to incur casualties in order to put pressure on Israel, which is horrible,” Netanyahu added, to Glor’s apparent skepticism.

“Did your army go too far,” Glor asked in response to Netanyahu’s explanation of Hamas’ modus operandi. “I don't know if any army would do anything differently if you had to protect your border against people who say, ‘we're going to destroy you and we're going to flood into your country,’” the PM countered. “You try other means. You try all sorts of means. You try non-lethal means, and they don't work, so you're left with bad choices. It's a bad deal.”

Glor ridiculously followed that up with questioning whether Israel could ever sit down and negotiate with the Hamas terrorists who want to kill them. Netanyahu masterfully shot back with his own rhetorical question: “Could you talk to Al Qaeda, would you have discussions with bin Laden?” “As long as they seek our destruction, what am I going to...

‘In addition to POC centered events there will be antiracist workshops for white folks’

Students at the embattled Evergreen State College, which made national headlines last year after it hosted an event that asked white people not to come on campus for a “Day of Absence,” have organized a new iteration of the controversial event despite administrators’ efforts to shift gears.

related: Lawmaker To Remove $26 Million Dollars From Evergreen College After Racist Students Takeover Campus

Students at the Olympia, Washington-based public school have organized a three-day “Day of Absence” observance that includes a mix of events on and off campus. Some gatherings are advertised as open to all skin colors and others ask that only POC, or People of Color, attend.

A poster hung at the school obtained by The College Fix declares that the no-whites-allowed self-segregation events will be held off campus. It asks people to RSVP at a website that spells out “No Nazis Allowed” in its URL.

The events launch today and run through Friday, according to organizers, who are not interested in media coverage of their event, according to a Facebook screenshot obtained by The College Fix.

A spokesman for Evergreen State College did not respond to a phone call and email from The College Fix on Tuesday seeking comment.

The theme of this year’s observance is “Deinstitutionalize/Decolonize.”

“The mission of this event is to bring POC together in order to create a reclamation of space and move forward into the future. In reaction to institution’s consistent disregard for our safety, we are...

Millions of Americans who lost manufacturing jobs during the 2000s have long ”known” China was to blame, not robots. And many helped elect Donald Trump as president because of his insistence that China was at fault.

Evidently many academics who’ve studied the issue are finally drawing the same conclusion.

For years economists have viewed the increased role of automation in the computer age as the chief culprit for some 6 million lost jobs from 1999 to 2010 — one-third of all U.S. manufacturing employment. Firms adopted new technologies to boost production, the thinking goes, and put workers out of the job in the process. Plants could make more stuff with fewer people.

In the past several years fresh thinking by economists such as David Autor of MIT has challenged that view. The latest research to poke holes in the theory of automation-is-to-blame is from Susan Houseman of the Upjohn Institute.

Academic research tends to be dry and complicated, but Houseman’s findings boil down to this: The government for decades has vastly overestimated the growth of productivity in the American manufacturing sector. It’s been growing no faster, really, than the rest of the economy.

What that means is, the adoption of technology is not the chief reason why millions of working-class Americans lost their jobs in a vast region stretching from the mouth of the Mississippi river to the shores of the Great Lakes. Nor was it inevitable.

Autor and now Houseman contend the introduction of China into the global trading system is root cause of the job losses.

Put another way, President Bill Clinton and political leaders who succeeded him accepted the risk that the U.S. would suffer short-term economic harm from opening the U.S. to Chinese exports in hopes of long-run gains of a more stable China.

No longer needing to worry about U.S. tariffs, the Chinese took full advantage. Low Chinese wages and a cheap Chinese currency — at a time when the dollar was strong — gave China several huge advantages. Companies shuttered operations in the U.S., moved to China and eventually set up...