Tag: Time Magazine

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international affairs media and media people

Maybe Next Year?

Time Magazine, Person of the Year, cat

Once again, TIME is skipping right over you and me for consideration as the magazine’s “Person of the Year for 2020.”

What am I saying, YOU were named back in 2006!

TIME’s choice can be important recognition for someone working against all odds to make a very positive difference in this world. Lech Wałęsa in 1981, for instance, and Gandhi in 1930.*

Last year’s pick of Greta Thornburg? Not. So. Much.

While presidents often get the coveted cover, President-​elect Joe Biden garnered only 3 percent of the public “advisory” vote. “Essential workers” had the most support at 35 percent. Seems too amorphous … a catalyst mostly for endless debate.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the federal government’s National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases for the last 36 years, was next at 31 percent of respondents. No one else had more than 5 percent.

Don’t choose Fauci, please! Despite his experience, his pandemic performance has been less than expert. Under his leadership, Americans were told for months that masks would be of no benefit, then suddenly mandated to wear them.

Last June, Sen. Rand Paul, who is a physician, tried to get Fauci to address the ample scientific data indicating it was safe to open the schools. Fauci deflected and dithered until flippantly declaring last week: “Close the bars and keep the schools open is what we really say.”

That is certainly not, Fox New’s Tucker Carlson exasperatedly explained, what Fauci was “really” saying months ago.

Forget Fauci. For leading the best national response to COVID-​19, TIME should name Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-​wen 2020’s “Person of the Year.”

It would send a powerful message about leadership. And freedom.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* The magazine has also named dictators and mass murderers: Hitler served as 1938’s “Man of the Year” and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin took the top spot the next year, and again in 1942; in 1979, with Americans held hostage in Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini glared at us from TIME’s cover. 

Note: My biggest disappointment was in 2013, when TIME cowardly choose Pope Francis over Edward Snowden.

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Gross Domestic Prevarication

Eternal Koch, meme, Paul Jacob, Koch Brothers, collage, photomontage, http://cognitivebiasparade.prosite.com/

A sign of these sorry times for professional journalism: Time magazine runs a dishonest smear against Charles Koch, completely twisting the billionaire’s remarks at a recent meeting of major donors in Orange County, California.

“Charles Koch Says US Can Bomb Its Way to $100,000 Salaries,” screamed the headline. The sub-​heading added, “Building bombs and using them is one way to growth, the billionaire suggests to allies.”

What did Mr. Koch actually tell the assembled crowd of major donors?

“I think we can have growth rates in excess of 4 percent. When I’m talking about growth rates,” explained Koch, “I’m not talking about that GDP, which counts poison gas the same as it counts penicillin. What a monstrous measure this is. If we make more bombs, the GDP goes up — particularly if we explode them.”

In other words, while Time’s headline portrayed Koch as a warmonger, the billionaire businessman wasn’t suggesting this country “Bomb Its Way” anywhere. Certainly not “to growth.” In fact, Koch was making the opposite point: true economic growth can’t come from producing or using “poison gas” or other munitions.

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who had found this article’s headline to be a flat-​out concocted falsehood; Time soon changed the headline.

Yet, even the re-​written headline was sort of a slap: “Charles Koch Mocks Common Measure of Prosperity.” Only after reading the sub-​head — “Calls ‘monstrous’ the notion that GDP values bombs as much as medicine” — was it clear that Koch was making a very common sense point.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Eternal Koch