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Wednesday, February 03, 2021

The 78th Treasury Secretary (Janet Yellen) And The 1st (Alexander Hamilton)

The continual mismanagement is what keeps us from enjoying the full pallet of emotions that truly enrich us. 

~Ruben Papian 



When you got skin in the game, you stay in the game
But you don't get a win unless you play in the game
Oh, you get love for it, you get hate for it
You get nothing if you
Wait for it, wait for it, wait for it

The 78th Treasury Secretary (Janet Yellen) And The 1st (Alexander Hamilton)


Marketplace, Biden: Yellen Needs a “Hamilton” Musical. Dessa: Here You Go.



 India to impose permanent ban on 59 Chinese apps, including TikTok


XI’S GOTTA HAVE IT:  WHO Director Who Covered for China to Be Harvard Commencement Speaker 

 

Introducing a new Reuters.com


Beyond State Capacity: Bureaucratic Performance, Policy Implementation, and Reform (PDF) Martin J. Williams. From the Abstract: “To advance the study of state bureaucratic quality, researchers should seek to understand the implications of bureaucracies’ collective nature, engage with contextual specificity and contingency in policy implementation, and focus measurement and reform efforts on actual performance rather than hypothetical capacity.”


 The next Michael Lewis book (NYT).


 Novovax data, including against the South African strain.  And wide confidence intervals


Carolyn Hopkins.


Chinese government is collecting Americans’ DNA.


John Cochrane on GameStop, etc.


And how Robinhood ran out of cash (NYT).  The misinformation in the MR comments section and elsewhere on this is egregious.  Here is yet more common sense, though I don’t quite agree with all the framing.


NEW YORK TIMES WRITER ARRESTED AS SECRET IRAN AGENT ACKNOWLEDGES HE WAS PAID BY IRANIAN GOVERNMENT.

New York Times spokesperson did not respond to a query about whether the newspaper, which according to a search on its website Monday morning had not yet covered the federal criminal complaint against [Kaveh] Afrasiabi, plans to tell its readers about the situation. The spokesperson also did not respond to a question about whether the newspaper plans to publish an editor’s note indicating that the opinion pieces came from someone who was getting paid by the Iranian government.


 

Are Fox News and MSNBC just opposite sides of the same coin?

Whenever the conservative, pro-Donald-Trump or right-wing biases of Fox News come up in conversation or stories, the instinct is for someone to say, “Well, that’s like MSNBC being in the tank for the left.”

In other words, is MSNBC simply the left-wing version of right-wing Fox News?

I admit that I’ve lazily made that reckless comparison myself.

So now I’m going to quote Oliver Darcy, media reporter from CNN. And, as I do, I can see the folks at Fox News and those who watch it regularly already rolling their eyes. Yes, Darcy is often critical of Fox News. And CNN is a rival of Fox News. But to be fair, MSNBC is technically a rival of CNN, too. In fact, I’d argue that MSNBC and CNN are actually fighting for many of the same viewers.

But I’m also quoting what Darcy said on Sunday’s “Reliable Sources” because I believe he is spot-on right.

“To equate what MSNBC does or some of these other outlets do with what Fox does is nonsensical,” Darcy said. “There are outlets that have opinion hosts, but they’re playing in the real world — in the world of facts and reality. Fox is spinning its own reality. To suggest there’s an equivalence between the two I think is not accurate and something we should really be careful to avoid.”

There’s nothing wrong with having strong opinions about policies. There’s nothing wrong with not liking a politician for his or her views or actions. And I’m not so naive that I don’t realize it’s the job of primetime pundits to attract viewers and stir up emotions.

But much of what we see on Fox News, especially in primetime, is not based in truth. For example, take the lie that the election was rigged and stolen from Donald Trump. Many on Fox News either told that lie, perpetuated that lie, or didn’t shoot it down — as was their journalistic duty.

Misleading the public, not giving the full story, endangering the public, causing dissension and welcoming dangerous and irresponsible guests is far too common on far too many Fox News shows.

And that’s what separates them, and not for the better, from MSNBC.