The Ridgewood Blog Brings a Free Market Laissez-faire Point of View to Local, New Jersey State and National Issues.
the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ, Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META) is making waves in the tech and political worlds with its decision to replace its third-party fact-checking program with a community-driven system inspired by Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter). CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the change in a video early Tuesday, signaling a shift in Meta’s approach to content moderation and free speech as President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take office.
By Charles Stampul
For centuries people have faked their deaths to escape threats or get free of burdens and responsibilities. This is what has happened to science. Continue reading The Death of Science Has Been Faked
June 27,2017
the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ, In the recent video footage obtained by Project Veritas, John Bonifield a Sr. Producer at CNN, admits to several beliefs that are in direct conflict with the official CNN narrative that Trump has colluded with Russia, and that Russia has interfered with the 2016 election. Bonifield expresses clear doubts that there is a fire behind the Russia smoke, stating, “I haven’t seen any good enough evidence to show that the President.
This comes after three CNN employees have handed in their resignations over a retracted story linking President Trump to Russia, the network announced Monday.The article was removed from CNN.com on Friday after the network decided it could no longer stand by its reporting.
RHS & Network for Responsible Public Policy Host Climate Forum
Reader , “Relentless advancement of an ideological agenda. Politics, propaganda, “intellectual” intimidation, naked cooptation of the previously respectable apparatus of scientific discovery and exposition. Like-minded zealots bent on transforming this country and the world according to their twisted, godless mindset. We must continue to fight this scourge.”
Climate Change the new Religious Cult
Posted Dec 16, 2016 by Martin Armstrong
This is the picture that was used to start the global warming movement that man supposedly created. Of course, since the weather is not consistently warmer, they changed the term from “global warming” to “climate change.” They pointed to everything from pollution, cutting down trees, exhaust from cars and buses, and even attributed it to cows farting, but they never provided any historical proof of real climate change outside of a normal cycle.
I lived in London in 1985 when the buses spewed out black smoke. It was horrible and hard to breath. That is the kind of pollution that we all want to eliminate. We want clean water and clean air — absolutely. But cutting down trees and diesel-spewing buses do not change the historic climate cycle — it just makes where you live nasty.
Science was turned on its head after a discovery in 1772 near Vilui, Siberia, of an intact frozen woolly rhinoceros, which was followed by the more famous discovery of a frozen mammoth in 1787. You may be shocked, but these discoveries of frozen animals with grass still in their stomachs set in motion these two schools of thought since the evidence implied you could be eating lunch and suddenly find yourself frozen, only to be discovered by posterity.
by Tyler Durden
Dec 26, 2016 4:01 PM
Late on Friday, with the US population embracing the upcoming holidays and oblivious of most news emerging from the administration, Obama quietly signed into law the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) which authorizes $611 billion for the military in 2017.
In a statement, Obama said that:
Today, I have signed into law S. 2943, the “National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017.” This Act authorizes fiscal year 2017 appropriations principally for the Department of Defense and for Department of Energy national security programs, provides vital benefits for military personnel and their families, and includes authorities to facilitate ongoing operations around the globe. It continues many critical authorizations necessary to ensure that we are able to sustain our momentum in countering the threat posed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and to reassure our European allies, as well as many new authorizations that, among other things, provide the Departments of Defense and Energy more flexibility in countering cyber-attacks and our adversaries’ use of unmanned aerial vehicles.”
Much of the balance of Obama’s statement blamed the GOP for Guantanamo’s continued operation and warned that “unless the Congress changes course, it will be judged harshly by history,” Obama said. Obama also said Congress failed to use the bill to reduce wasteful overhead (like perhaps massive F-35 cost overruns?) or modernize military health care, which he said would exacerbate budget pressures facing the military in the years ahead.
By David McCabe – 09/16/16 06:17 AM EDT
Facebook says it is working to fight the spread of fake news on its platform after false stories claiming the 9/11 attacks were a conspiracy and that Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly was backingHillary Clinton appeared among its “trending topics.”
The trending section is supposed to include news stories that are popular among users, but the algorithms used to determine their selection have backfired on the company.
“We’ve actually spent a lot of time on News Feed trying to reduce [fake news and hoaxes’] prevalence in the ecosystem,” Adam Mosseri, who leads work on Facebook’s News Feed, said Wednesday at a tech conference. “I think we’re doing now some more similar work on trending to improve the experience in a similar way.”
https://thehill.com/policy/technology/296211-facebook-steps-up-fight-against-fake-news
file photo by Boyd Loving
Journalism full of assumptions that shouldn’t be.
A. Barton Hinkle | October 19, 2015
“Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views,” William F. Buckley once observed, “but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.” He might have been writing about some of the nation’s newsrooms.
Many media establishments obsess over diversity of pigment, while remaining ideologically monochromatic. This produces big blind spots and glaring examples of unconscious bias.
Here is one such example. A recent Wall Street Journal article on bicycle helmet laws began this way: “Helmets help prevent head injuries, so laws requiring cyclists to wear them would seem obvious.”
Really? Why?
Helmet laws seem “obvious” only if you take several things as already given: (1) that government should force people to do what is in their own best interest; (2) that government actually can know what is in other people’s best interest; and (3) that laws designed to promote people’s best interests actually will do so.
The point of the article, however, was to note that cycling advocates take what it calls a “surprising” position: Mandatory helmet laws “make cycling less convenient and seem less safe, thus hindering the larger public-health gains of more people riding bikes. All-ages helmet laws might actually make cycling more dangerous, some cyclists say, by decreasing ridership. Research shows that the more cyclists there are on the road, the fewer crashes there are.” It goes on to cite research showing that the reduction in head injuries is offset by increased obesity caused by people not riding, which thus produces “a net negative health impact.”
In short, given No. 3 might be wrong: A government program passed with good intentions might have unintended consequences.
Imagine that.
https://reason.com/archives/2015/10/19/the-medias-narrow-minds
