2020 Edelman Trust Barometer Global Report
Randomly selected 1,150 respondents in each of 28 countries around the world, surveyed by Edelman Worldwide, between 19 October and 18 November, in 2019
“2020 Edelman Trust Barometer”
A friend happens to run a web-archiving service and has been coming under intense pressure to remove allegedly “false” Web-pages from his archive’s records. This would be censorship by that Web-archive. I sent him this note arguing that he should not:
Once you get into doing that, you will lose all credibility yourself.
They want to meet me not because I’m Mike from Kansas, because I represent the greatest nation in the history of civilization.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo 28 February 2020
I want everyone to be reminded that America remains the world’s leading light of humanitarian goodness as well amidst this global pandemic.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo 7 April 2020
The Covid-19 pandemic continues to dominate the news and life of the American Republic. With currently no end in sight it is not paranoid to wonder if and how the pandemic will affect the presidential elections coming up in November. Two World Wars, The Civil War, The Great Depression and the Spanish Flu were not enough to stop voting for some congressmen and the top executive of the United States as planned.
We are living in strange times indeed. This crisis raises many questions about the nature of freedom and what our expectations are, or should be. Everyone has their own notions about what freedom means and how far that should extend to oneself and indeed, to everyone else.
I want to start with a look at where we’ve come from before I look at where we are now, as I feel it gives a better understanding of our definitions of freedom and a better context for viewing where we are, at this moment in time.
This will not be alleging that democracy is less good than its alternative (dictatorship), because that obviously is not the case; but it is instead about what even democracies cannot avoid, because humans are stupid, which means that only a minority of any human population can think sufficiently clearly and honestly about political issues so as to have the capacity to vote even in their own best interest regarding whom to vote for.
Eric Zuesse
Just as the corrupt U.S. Government is bailing out owners of U.S. corporations while the American public experiences a recession that is heading into a depression, the corrupt German Government likewise is bailing out investors. It’s not illegal for the Government to do that — not even when the corporation that they might bail out next is the nation’s flag-carrying airline, which already receives unfair advantages in competing against other airlines in that country.
Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hit streak? No. Sabrina Williams’ 23 Grand Slam singles titles, the most by any man or woman in the Open Era? No. Michael Phelps’ all-time record for Olympic gold medals? No.
Those records and all like them matter only to a few and will probably be broken someday.
The prophecies are here and it is a foregone conclusion: the post-coronavirus world will look fundamentally different from anything that we have seen or experienced, at least since the end of World War II.
Even before the ‘curve flattened’ in many countries that have experienced high death tolls — let alone economic devastation — as a result of the unhindered spread of the COVID-19 disease, thinkers and philosophers began speculating, from the comfort of their own quarantines, about the many scenarios that await us.
