The Press-Dispatch
Issue link: https://www.ifoldsflip.com/i/1071678
C-8 Wednesday, Januar y 16, 2019 The Press-Dispatch OPINION Submit Letters to the Editor: Letters must be signed and received by noon on Mondays. Email: editor@pressdispatch.net or bring in a hard copy: 820 E. Poplar Street, Petersburg In an ideal world, America's break with King George III's Brit- ain would have been a clean, sim- ple affair. We'd have announced our intention to leave, been told to suit ourselves and there's the door, and bang — it would've been done. But the king had other ideas. We prevailed, but it took a protracted war to do it. Fast forward to today, and one can't help noticing certain paral- lels to Britain's situation with the European Union. In June 2016, frustrated by the invasive hand of bureaucrat- ic meddling from Brussels, Brit- ish citizens voted to exit the EU (aka Brexit). No one could rea- sonably expect the EU to take the news well, but still — this break, too, should have been a clean, sim- ple affair. No such luck. Instead, aided and abetted by those in Britain who op- posed Brexit, the EU has done ev- erything it can to drag out their departure and make it as painful as possible. The purpose is not so much to make Britain reconsider (though the EU naturally hopes that Brit- ain's sojourn of self- determination can in- deed be a short one). It's to warn other na- tions who might be tempted to imitate Britain that the price will be high. In short, they want to make an example out of the up- starts. So did British Prime Minister The- resa May's team of London's ca- reer bureaucrats push back, as they should have? No, they made a conciliatory deal with Brussels. The pro-Brexit members of her Conservative Party were under- standably outraged. What's to be done about this particular problem? In a long conversation I had in London over the Christmas hol- iday, Professor Deepak Lal of UCL A, one of the world's lead- ing economists, explained why the U.K. should adopt a "tit for tat" strategy. Essentially, Britain needs to leverage its strengths to get what it wants. "Mrs. May should announce in Janu- ary that the UK will leave the EU customs union and single mar- ket as well as the ju- risdiction of the Euro- pean Court of Justice on March 29," Mr. Lal writes in a recent col- umn. "But, to facili- tate the negotiation of a free-trade arrangement with the EU, the UK will provide duty- free access to imports from the EU for a limited period. "If the EU reciprocates with similar duty-free access for British exports for the period it takes to complete a legal [free-trade agree- ment], there would be no change in the import/export trading sta- tus quo after March 29. There would be no need for lorry parks, stocking of food and medicines, or disturbance of supply chains." The Weekly by Jill Heuring Yarns of our lives Facebook and censorship My Point of View by Dr. H. K. Fenol, Jr., M.D. I do some Facebook viewing and find many useful and inspir- ing items such as wise sayings and interesting stories with fas- cinating endings, and lessons in life. It seems though, there are still some blogs that are uncom- fortable to view or read because the topics are about the toxic at- mosphere of politics, attacks on different faiths and beliefs, some- times just plain vicious comments from highly opinionated segments of society. Noticeably, however, it seems there has been an effort by the Facebook crew to clean up some items that were outrightly dangerous and offensive. Years ago when I started doing some Facebook viewing, the con- tents of the blogs were really up- setting. I think since Congress had looked into this matter, a nice clean-up has taken place. We are blessed with the freedom to ex- press our opinions but sometimes this gift is abused. In some areas of the world, strong censorship is imposed. Sometimes there is even an ab- solute restriction of access to the internet. You know what I mean and who I'm referring to. So in a democracy such as what we en- joy, there is always the difficult balance between freedom to ex- press ideas and opinions, and the dangerous crossing of lines that should not be transgressed. The Orthodox Church in the Ukraine is tearing itself apart and creating a schism within the larg- er church. The rupture became official with the Ecumenical Pa- triarch Bartholomew of Constan- tinople signing a "Tomos of Au- tocephaly," which establishes a Ukrainian church independent of its mother church—The Russian Orthodox Church. This schism has been a long time coming, and the reasons are many; as Protestantism has been beset by divisions, the Orthodox Church likewise has been infect- ed. However, the divisions within Orthodoxy are not predicated up- on issues that broke the Church apart in 1517 with the Protestant Reformation. The early Church was a collection of au- tonomous 'church- houses;" therefore, the early church was decentralized, yet it acted as a confeder- ation of like-minded Christians who shared the faith and doctrines while not allowing lo- cal practices to create divisions. Each church had a recog- nized bishop (patriarch,) and the Church settled serious doctrinal issues through ecumenical synods or councils. However, the bishop of Rome by 250 AD was claiming that since the Church at Rome was located at the seat of the empire, and Peter was the first bishop, he [the bishop of Rome] is the first bishop among bish- ops. This claim creat- ed dissension that the church has never over- come. As Christianity be- came more acceptable throughout the Roman Empire, teachings be- gan to clash over the Godhead and the personage of Christ. Points to Ponder by Rev. Ford Bond The good, the bad, and the other Continued on page 9 Continued on page 9 Continued on page 9 Continued on page 9 Minority View by Walter E. Williams Glimmer of hope for black education Continued on page 9 Continued on page 9 In reference to efforts to teach black children, the president of the St. Petersburg, Florida, chap- ter of the NA ACP, Maria Scrug- gs, said: "The (school) district has shown they just can't do it... Now it's time for the community to step in." That's a recognition that pol- iticians and the education estab- lishment, after decades of promis- es, cannot do much to narrow the huge educational achievement gap between Asians and whites on the one hand and blacks on the other. The most crucial input for a child's education cannot be pro- vided by schools or politicians. Continued calls for higher edu- cation budgets will produce dis- appointing results, as they have in the past. There are certain minimum re- quirements that must be met for any child, regardless of race, to do well in school. Someone must make the youngster do his homework — and pos- sibly help him with it. Someone must en- sure that he gets eight hours of sleep. Someone must feed him wholesome meals, including breakfast. Finally, someone must ensure that he gets to school on time, behaves in school and re- spects the teachers. If these min- imum requirements are not met — and they can be met even if a family is poor — all else is for naught. Scruggs says that it's time for the black community to accept part of the blame. Part of the problem is the lack of parents' involvement in their children's education — for exam- ple, their not attending parent- teacher nights. Having children's Negotiating a no-deal Brexit Heritage Viewpoint by Edwin J. Feulner Pursuit of the Cure by Star Parker Lucid Moments By Bart Stinson Left-wing fake news hurts the nation Antitrust enforcement in the age of Zuckerberg Teddy Roosevelt came from a background of inherited money. He grew up in a large house sur- rounded by servants, and so you might consider him an unlikely crusader against the concentra- tion of wealth and market power in the few. But Teddy had been around the block a few times. Unlike Astors and Vanderbilts who quarantined themselves from the lives and con- cerns of ordinary Americans, he had his finger on the pulse. And Teddy was convinced that his ty- coon neighbors were short-sight- ed, that they were on track to kill the goose that laid golden eggs. Revolution was brewing, and the elites' arrogant exercises of raw power were provocative. Teddy Roosevelt did not have any role in the passage of the Sher- man Antitrust Act. It was already a decade old when an immigrant shot William McKinley, and Roo- sevelt became president. But the time was ripe for its enforcement, and Roosevelt went into action. His attorney general filed suit against Northern Securities, a mo- nopolistic railroad company owned by J. Pierpont Morgan. Morgan complained to dinner guests that it was "rude" of the Roosevelt ad- ministration to bring suit against his company without warning him. Four days later he was in the White House bellowing at the president that he was being treat- ed like a common criminal. The president offered no compromise, and vowed to go to trial. Morgan asked if his other (vast) holdings were at risk, and the president ba- sically told him that depended on whether the other companies did anything wrong. Morgan could continue to make his money as long as he dealt fair- ly with consumers and other busi- nesses, but Roosevelt was not go- ing to be deferential to monopo- lists. Over the past century, antitrust enforcement has evolved from a question of fairness to a technical determination of market efficien- cy. At antitrust proceedings, econ- omists are called as expert wit- nesses to testify on arcane calcu- lations that few of us understand. The government has the leeway to make exceptions to anti-monop- oly laws, and the most familiar of these was the Justice Department- approved Joint Operating Agree- ment ( JOA) between competing big-city daily newspapers. Most newspaper JOA have collapsed, one by one. But monopoly is in its heyday. "The market share of the largest social media platform in the U.S. is 60 percent," writes University of Chicago professor Luigi Zingales. The largest two have 86 percent of the market, the largest four have 98 percent of the market. That's a monopoly that might have made Morgan blush. Any freedom lover will have mixed feelings about the prospect of regulating the Internet monop- olies. We're against government censorship of facts and political or social opinion. We're against the government muscling its way into people's decisions about their own property. But what about censorship by private parties? What happens when a business has more pow- er over individual citizens' free speech rights than the govern- ment? There has been a great deal of guerrilla censorship in the U.S. by Silicon Valley leftists, but Google has undertaken sweeping sys- tematic censorship in collabora- tion with China. Project "Drag- onfly" developed blacklists for a censored search engine demand- ed by the Communist regime, to block searches concerning human rights, democracy and peaceful protest. If Google CEO Sundar Pichai is ever propositioned to do likewise in his adopted American home- land, he will have the skill set for it. And no lack of volunteers for the It's been a long time in the making, but that makes it all the sweeter. Jill has finished her first knitting project, a small scarf, af- ter only 10 months. In the beginning, it was a sim- pler time. We were expecting our second girl, Jill got a bunch of yarn for her birthday, she start- ed knitting... and three-fourths of the way into the first skein, Amelia was born. Having a child changes a lot of things, but having multiple, well, it multiplies the changes. We nev- er could have imagined how our lives would be different, and to be honest, I hardly remember how things used to be. But the bottom line is, Jill didn't touch her yarn again for a solid three months, and when she did, it was to work on one mea- ger row a night, if she could get both girls to sleep at the same time... Which is NOT a guarantee. Even so, she hung with it and kept working. Finally, we began to gain a few inches of mastery over our new situation. We started learning how to get things done and keep our heads above water with two kids, although if any- one knows how to get more sleep, please call me. And then, one day... Jill sat down and fin- ished the scarf. It was almost a year in the making. But she didn't give up. Left-wing media stalwarts such as Newsweek, Huffington Post and Salon launched a barrage of fake news after I appeared on "Fox and Friends" recently to discuss new Agriculture Department rules tightening work requirement on food stamps. Unfortunately, the now all-too- common disinformation cam- paigns from the left, distorting or simply lying about what our presi- dent says or does, or what conser- vative commentators like me say, just simply hurts our nation. The oxygen of freedom is infor- mation. When citizens get fake news instead, they become slaves to the agendas being pushed by politically motivated media ma- chines. The Huffington Post headline read, "'Fox and Friends' Guest Says People On Food Stamps Watch Porn Instead of Working." You can imagine the mail I got from those outraged by my sup- posedly heartless remarks about our nation's less fortunate. But I didn't say what the left- wing media foghorns reported in their headlines. As result, not on- ly were many misled, but also they weren't informed about what I did say about two major problems con- fronting our nation. One, there are great inefficien- cies in our food stamp program, which, at $ 65 billion in federal spending annually, is one of our largest federal welfare programs. And two, the nation has a major problem of millions of able-bod- ied prime-age males who have dropped out of the work force.