monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Last week, as world leaders and business elites arrived in Davos for the World Economic Forum, Bill Gates tweeted an infographic to his 46 million followers showing that the world has been getting better and better. “This is one of my favourite infographics,” he wrote. “A lot of people underestimate just how much life has improved over the past two centuries.”

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It’s a powerful narrative. And it’s completely wrong.

Huxley offers a description in about a hundred words which applies to neither the granfalloons of the left nor the right. The people — the consumers — have made this choice, seduced by the vapid promises of our cultural mythology which we persist in calling the "American dream".

Educational standards have been watered down,

workers' jobs have been "de-skilled",

infrastructure has been allowed to decay

, our current government weakens environmental and consumer safety laws

and offers us some silly version of "freedom" where access to weapons is deemed more important than access to clean air and safe drinking water.

I hardly have to draw attention to the opioid problem, the epidemic of obesity, and the rise of the anti-vaccination movement, all signs of an underlying sickness independent of your obsolete political categories.

You mention "thought" and "face" crimes — can you supply any examples? And how is "free speech" in danger?

Foxconn, which raised hopes of a US manufacturing revival by announcing a new factory in Wisconsin, is now reconsidering its plans.

The Taiwanese manufacturing giant no longer expects to make liquid crystal display panels at the Wisconsin plant, a company official told Reuters.

It plans to hire mostly engineers and researchers not manufacturing workers.

The changes are a significant shift from the firm's plans announced at a White House ceremony in 2017.

At the time, US President Donald Trump claimed credit for landing the investment, which he said was a sign his policies were returning investment to the US.

The yet-to-be-built facility was the "eighth wonder of the world", he said at a groundbreaking ceremony last summer.

Foxconn, a major Apple supplier, had pledged to invest $10bn (£7.6bn) in the plant, which was expected to initially employ 3,000 people, with a potential for up to 13,000, mainly entry-level jobs.

In a statement to the Wisconsin State Journal on Wednesday, Foxconn cited a changed global marketplace, saying all of its projects are being "adjusted to meet these new realities."

"We remain committed to the Wisconsin Valley Science and Technology Park Project, the creation of 13,000 jobs, and to our long-term investment in Wisconsin. As we have previously noted, the global market environment that existed when the project was first announced has changed," the company said.


The state of Wisconsin had agreed to support the project with controversial incentives worth more than $3bn.

Critics of those incentives had long said they did not think that Foxconn would deliver on its promises.

The firm has already fallen short of yearly hiring goals, preventing its receipt of tax credits last year.

Louis Woo, special assistant to Foxconn boss Terry Gou, told Reuters that the firm was still evaluating options for Wisconsin - including creating a "technology hub" made up largely of research facilities for high-tech products aimed at health care, industrial.

But he said high labour costs in the US meant making advanced TV screens didn't make sense.

"In terms of TV, we have no place in the US," he told Reuters. "We can't compete."

It's only the leftists on this country who proclaim it's dead.

Who controls and has controlled the educational depts in this country for the last 30 years? I'll give you a hint, it isn't the right leaning folks.

Thank you NAFTA for sending American jobs to Mexico.

I happen to see a lot of those "regulations", they aren't laws they were not passed by Congress and signed by the President, as over regulation.

You talk about freedom, but you praise govt laws and regulation, which actually limits our freedom.

You don't like freedom, you want a powerful central govt to make decisions for people, that isn't freedom.

No, it's dead to the people for whom the dream has not come true.

Actually in a lot of localities it is.

And you can thank international capitalism for NAFTA. (De-skilling precedes NAFTA by many years.)

Needed laws not passed by Congress — an example of under-regulation.

I've got plenty of freedom. I don't see that laws against air pollution or dangerous food additives limit my freedom in any meaningful way.

Actually, banning, regulating, or controlling dangerous substances contributes to the health and safety of our communities without which "freedom" means very little.

The Covington mob scene really doesn't represent anything other than age old conflicts between people who choose to confront each other over political disagreements. People get hyped up at rallies and demonstrations — both participants and observers. The confusing incident at the Lincoln Memorial hardly sets the stage for a nationwide crackdown on smirking.

"Thought crime" is much too dramatic a phrase to describe the incidents you refer to.

Organizations are free to set standards of behavior and individuals are free to challenge those standards and face the consequences.

No one was arrested, no one went to jail, no government agents were involved.

Do you actually want the government to regulate hiring and firing in businesses?

The Covington mob scene really doesn't represent anything other than age old conflicts between people who choose to confront each other over political disagreements. People get hyped up at rallies and demonstrations

Love the "should go back to school" advice from Trump

These 9 things are 'officially Islamophobic' after UK councils adopt new definition

Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Muslims as such, or of Muslims as a collective group, such as, especially but not exclusively, conspiracies about Muslim entryism in politics, government or other societal institutions; the myth of Muslim identity having a unique propensity for terrorism and claims of a demographic ‘threat’ posed by Muslims or of a ‘Muslim takeover’.

What kind of insanity is this from the dems?

Jefferson Country School District in CO is a perfect example of right leaning people winning an election and the teachers unions getting recall elections put in place via lies.

No matter where you live, if your children go to public schools, the textbooks they use were very possibly written under Texas influence. If they graduated with a reflexive suspicion of the concept of separation of church and state and an unexpected interest in the contributions of the National Rifle Association to American history, you know who to blame.

When it comes to meddling with school textbooks, Texas is both similar to other states and totally different. It’s hardly the only one that likes to fiddle around with the material its kids study in class. The difference is due to size—4.8 million textbook-reading schoolchildren as of 2011—and the peculiarities of its system of government, in which the State Board of Education is selected in elections that are practically devoid of voters, and wealthy donors can chip in unlimited amounts of money to help their favorites win.

Those favorites are not shrinking violets. In 2009, the nation watched in awe as the state board worked on approving a new science curriculum under the leadership of a chair who believed that “evolution is hooey.” In 2010, the subject was social studies and the teachers tasked with drawing up course guidelines were supposed to work in consultation with “experts” added on by the board, one of whom believed that the income tax was contrary to the word of God in the scriptures.

Ever since the 1960s, the selection of schoolbooks in Texas has been a target for the religious right, which worried that schoolchildren were being indoctrinated in godless secularism, and political conservatives who felt that their kids were being given way too much propaganda about the positive aspects of the federal government. Mel Gabler, an oil company clerk, and his wife, Norma, who began their textbook crusade at their kitchen table, were the leaders of the first wave. They brought their supporters to State Board of Education meetings, unrolling their “scroll of shame,” which listed objections they had to the content of the current reading material. At times, the scroll was fifty-four feet long. Products of the Texas school system have the Gablers to thank for the fact that at one point the New Deal was axed from the timeline of significant events in American history.

A member of President Trump’s transition team was announced as a new board member of a company owned by Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska as soon as the Treasury Department lifted sanctions on Deripaska’s companies Sunday.

On Sunday, the Treasury Department lifted the sanctions on three companies owned by Deripaska 10 months after it imposed them, citing Russia’s “malign activity around the globe.” Deripaska, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, was also personally sanctioned because the government accused him of threats to rivals, bribing government officials and links to organized crime.