Terrible, Horrible, Very Bad, No Good Stories In the Paper That Make Readers Wonder if Reporters Have Lost Their Minds

The LA Times is at again. Yesterday it ran two stories on the front page of the California section claiming that President Trump's use of the words "China Virus" caused a young religiously conflicted incel by the name Robert Aaron Long to murder six Thai women in Atlanta and that this was the end result of a dangerous wave of anti-Asian hate sweeping the land. 

This is not straightforward reporting. The writer, Brittny Mejia, apparently wants so much to blame the Thai sex worker killings on Trump's use of the words China virus she acts as if there were no connection between China and the 500,000 deaths we have suffered here from the Wuhan virus. I don't doubt that Trump's use of the words China Virus did contribute to anti-Asian sentiment in this country. But I am also sure that Trump's words pale into insignificance as motivation for anti-Asian feeling when compared to the overwhelmingly more significant fact that China blithely let three-quarters of a million people travel to this country at a time when it knew it had a fatal, infectious virus spiraling out of Wuhan. The Chinese government quite reasonably banned flights from Wuhan to other parts of China but did not stop flights from Wuhan to the United States. That's why people here were furious with China.

Also notice how the Times reporter, Brittny Mejia, conflates Thai with Chinese by calling them both Asian. This way she doesn't have to address why Long would kill Thai workers if his real beef was with China.

Presidents, of course, need to be careful in their use of language, given how many nutcases are loose in the land. But I also suspect Trump's use of the words China Virus added perhaps one inch to an Everest-sized mountain of resentment towards China for standing by while the virus escaped its land. It is also true, according to everything we know, that Long wasn't thinking of their ethnicity when he killed six women in Atlanta. He killed them (and two men) because he was a religious nut who saw the existence of sex workers as a threat to his deeply fragile self-esteem. 

This is why Mejia's story, and another similar one about a Koreatown rally that appeared on the same page, makes people not trust the major media anymore. The media know that if you are going to postulate a wave of anti-Asian hysteria sweeping the land you need some extremely serious incidents to make the case. Mere instances of name-calling and jostling in the street aren't going to do it. That's why so many in the media have seized on the otherwise unrelated Atlanta sex murders as a way to prove their contention that America is racist to the core.

Yes, it is true. Asians are being attacked in greater numbers than before. But it isn't whites who are doing the attacks.

I am sure getting tired of reading day after day that the killings in Atlanta were the result of anti-Asian hate. The killer, Robert Aaron Long, was, by all accounts, obsessed with sex and religion, not by anti-Asian animus. 

But the notion that white anti-Asian racism caused the attacks is too useful to leftist activists to discard. Instead, day after day the media keeps pushing the narrative that this massacre of six Asian women (and two non-Asian men) is proof, that America is an irredeemably racist county.  In yesterday's edition, the LA Times ran a story by one of the paper's three columnists on its racism beat, asserting that this latest outrage in Atlanta has finally prompted the black and Asian communities to join forces to fight the never-ending plague of "white supremacy," a euphemism, as far as I can tell, for whites in general. 

The notion that it is predominately whites who are committing these crimes against Asians is demonstrably not true. First of all, the incidence of anti-Asian incidents in this the time of Covid is still small. There were only seven hate crimes against Asians in Los Angeles in 2019. The number went up to 11 in 2020. This is distressing but it is still hardly a wave. Furthermore, of the people behind these anti-Asian attacks, whites weren't even a majority. According to the American Spectator, quoting Andrew Sullivan, 24% of violent attacks on Asians were committed by whites and 28% were committed by blacks. Since blacks make up only 13% of the US population this means that a given black is seven times more likely to attack an Asian than a white is. 

In New York City last year, says Sullivan, police arrested 11 blacks for attacks on Asians but only two whites, and this despite the fact that the white population of the city is three times higher than the black one.

Conclusion: Yes, it is true. Asians are being attacked in greater numbers than before. But it isn't whites who are behind them.

As for LA Times columnist Erika Smith, she apparently knows full well who is most responsible as she says in her column it is time both to stop "focusing on individual perpetrators" and to quit "demanding more policing, more laws and more prosecutions." Instead, in a wonderful sleight of hand, she says we rather need to blame the real causes behind the attacks: "white supremacy, systemic racism and the social constructs that support them."

Right, the last thing we want to do is blame the people actually committing the crimes.

 

Radiolab Believes You Can Print Money Without causing Inflation

 You hear weird stuff when you listen to podcasts in your room in the dark at 2 am. The UFO stuff I usually enjoy when it's not too far out. But this January 15 Radiolab podcast is definitely pushing the outer limits. According to their bubbly young reporter (I am sorry to say I could never catch her name), whenever the government wants to jazz up the economy (or otherwise help out people in need because of Covid) all it has to do is go to a room in the Fed, open a spreadsheet and create a couple of trillion dollars out of thin air.

Now this isn't borrowed money that will add to the national debt, says Radiolab, it is created money. There is a quirk in our laws that allows the Mint to create platinum coins in any denomination that it wants (trillions for example) and sell them to the Fed, which then creates the money in its computer spreadsheet so it can be used by central banks.

Now, won't this just create massive inflation, the Radiolab host asks the bubbly reporter, as they have in Venezuela (inflation of 300,000 to 400,000 percent with a single roll of toilet paper now costing as much as some people get from their monthly pension)?

Not necessarily, answers the reporter. The Fed created money out of thin air back in 2007 when we had the big mortgage crisis and the result was the US suffered no inflation at all. Inflation, the reporter quotes an economist as saying, is simply a matter of expectations. If people don't expect prices to increase they probably won't, especially if the new money is used simply to meet normal demands like rent, food, and small business payrolls.

Can this be true? When the government needs money to give to people who are hurting because of the Covid pandemic all it needs to do is get the Fed to go to its computer spreadsheet and type in say, two trillion, and the presses start printing checks and pretty soon $1400 arrives in the mail to tide us all over for the next six months?

Sounds wonderful. And also unbelievable. Life is not that easy. Inflation is out there waiting, if not staglation too. I wish it were otherwise but I can't help but feeling that six months or a year down the road the Jimmy Carter economy will stir in its coffin, climb out of its grave and stagger out of the cemetery to mug us in the streets.

This Is Why People Don't Trust The Media Anymore, Part XII

 Today's LA Times has seven stories on anti-Asian racism, including this front-page story which alleges, contrary to the evidence, that the Atlanta massage parlor killings were a manifestation of anti-Asian hate. Apparently not finding any recent serious anti-Asian crimes, for the second day in a row the Time's Gustavo Arellano reaches back many decades to find racist incidents to write about. 

It is clear to me now why reporters are twisting the motivation behind Atlanta massage murders into anti-Asian racism. Up till now most of the incidents against Asians in the wake of the Wuhan-originated Covid epidemic have been stupid cat-calls or harassment in the street.  Even so, the increase has hardly been a "wave," (hate crimes against Asians increased from 7 in Los Angeles in 2019 to 15 last year). But if you are sufficiently versed in sophistry you can repurpose the Atlanta sexual dementia murders into evidence of genocide, thus proving once again what an irredeemably racist country America is.

Never Let A Good Crisis Go To Waste

        As far as I can tell the man who killed six Asian women and two men at three Atlanta massage parlors, Robert Aaron Long, was obsessed with sex, not race. Even so, the fact that the victims were Asian proved too tempting for some media commentators to resist, and they immediately linked the killings to racist attacks on Asian-Americans in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic. Many commentators repeatedly blamed the workers' deaths on former president Trump for his repeated references to the "China Virus." Basically, the commentators said, it was wildly racist for anyone to talk about a "China Virus," as, in their words, a virus is a virus is a virus and one's ethnicity has nothing to do with it. 

        That is true, but also beside the point. The virus started in Wuhan, China, perhaps in a life-animal outdoor food market and spread so fast in China that the government halted all flights from Wuhan to other parts of the country in an attempt to contain the spread. The one thing the Chinese government didn't do was stop flights from Wuhan to the United States especially LAX, which might be one reason why southern California has been hit so much harder than other parts of the country.  

        Given that, I can't see how anyone is wrong in calling the virus the Wuhan Virus. There is a long history in epidemiology in referring to viruses by the place where they began. Within the last week, I have read repeatedly about the South African variant, the Brazilian variant, the UK variant, and the California variant. 

        Are these racist too?

        The answer is obviously not. The reason no one complains about them though is that they don't serve the left's contention that the U.S. is an irredeemably racist country. Yes, it is true that the dead workers were all Asian but all the happy ending massage parlors in my neck of Eagle Rock are Asian too. If all the massage parlors in Atlanta were Hungarian or Swedish I suspect Robert Aaron Long would have killed the workers there just as readily. Long was furious because these women worked in the sex trade, not because they came from Asia. 

       

Equality of Outcome is Tyranny

 Glenn Loury in March 4th testimony before the Senate Banking Committee on why the government should not try to make sure that different racial groups have the same outcomes in every activity:

". . . group group-egalitarians claim that absent injustice, we should have equal representation of groups in every human enterprise. But how can that be? If groups matter, some people are going to bounce a basketball 100,000 times a month and other people are going to bounce it 10,000 times. times a month."

Given their different interests, trying to enforce equity between such people will only result in "tyranny and more racism."

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Making Money Out Of Thin Air

You hear weird stuff when you listen to podcasts in your room in the dark at 2 am. The UFO stuff I usually enjoy when it's not too far out. But this January 15 Radiolab podcast is definitely pushing the outer limits. According to their bubbly young reporter (I am sorry to say I could never catch her name), whenever the government wants to jazz up the economy (or otherwise help out people in need because of Covid) all it has to do is go to a room in the Fed, open a spreadsheet, a spreadsheet and create a couple of trillion dollars out of thin air.

Now this isn't borrowed money that will add to the national debt, says Radiolab, it is created money. There is a quirk in our laws that allows the Mint to create platinum coins in any denomination that it wants (trillions for example) and sell them to the Fed, which then creates the money in its computer spreadsheet so it can be used by central banks.

Now, won't this just create massive inflation, the Radiolab host asks the bubbly reporter, as they have in Venezuela (inflation of 300,000 to 400,000 percent with a single roll of toilet paper now costing as much as some people get from their monthly pension)?

Not necessarily, answers the reporter. The Fed created money out of thin air back in 2007 when we had the big mortgage crisis and the result was the US suffered no inflation at all. Inflation, the reporter quotes an economist as saying, is simply a matter of expectations. If people don't expect prices to increase they probably won't, especially if the new money is used simply to meet normal demands like rent, food, and small business payrolls.

Can this be true? When the government needs money to give to people who are hurting because of the Covid pandemic all it needs to do is get the Fed to go to its computer spreadsheet and type in say, two trillion, and the presses start printing checks and pretty soon $1400 arrives in the mail to tide us all over for the next six months?

Sounds wonderful. And also unbelievable. Life is not that easy. Inflation is out there waiting, if not staglation too. I wish it were otherwise but I can't help but feeling that six months or a year down the road the Jimmy Carter economy will stir in its coffin, climb out of its grave and stagger out of the cemetery to mug us in the streets.

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Radiolab - More Money Less Problems

Back in March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic was just beginning and the shelter-in-place orders brought the economy to a screeching halt, a quirky-but-clever idea to save the economy made its way up to some of the highest levels of government. Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib proposed an ambitious reli...

Sending Checks To Immigrants Early

 I once read that 7% of the world's population would move to the United States if they could. If the world's population is currently about 8 billion, that would be adding 560 million people to the 330 million who already live here.  That would give the US a population of 890 million.

Can we handle that many more people? I am not sure. It already takes me 45 minutes to get to the west side of Los Angeles and that is when the traffic is light. To visit certain parks here in California you have to make reservations a year in advance.

I know the counter-arguments for illegal immigration. People come here because they want to improve their lives. Or they come because they need asylum. If that is the case, why do we make them actually be present in the United States before granting them the benefits they would receive if they lived here? Is someone standing one foot south of our border with Mexico less deserving than someone standing one foot north?

If someone really wants to live in the United States but hasn't had the opportunity to cross the border yet, why don't we just mail him his benefits check early? That way he could have the economic advantages of living here without actually having to be physically present. He gets to enjoy the bosom of his family at home and I get to drive across Los Angeles without being stuck in traffic all the way.