RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/vivek-ramaswamy-federal-reserve-monetary-policy-stable-dollar-presidential-race-2024-5b4abfaf?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Vivek Ramaswamy may be a longshot in his bid for the GOP presidential nomination, but the entrepreneur deserves credit for taking on issues that matter. His op-ed for these pages on Tuesday teed up reform of the Federal Reserve, a presidential-level issue that affects every American.

Most candidates haven’t done enough homework to talk about the Fed or monetary policy without looking foolish. And even for those who have, the conventional political wisdom is that the subjects are too complicated to grab public attention.

Yet that hasn’t always been true. Ronald Reagan campaigned on the need for a stable dollar, and the late Congressman Jack Kemp talked about making the dollar “as good as gold.” Those lines struck a populist chord as Americans faced the destructive inflation of the 1970s and the painful monetary tightening to defeat it in the 1980s. The U.S. is back at that same stand, with Washington having unleashed another inflation and the Fed now scrambling to beat it. Bank failures are one result.

Mr. Ramaswamy’s helpful contribution was to trace the Fed’s monetary mistakes back to the central bank’s loss of focus on keeping the dollar and exchange rates stable. That was the lesson Paul Volcker and other central bankers took away from the inflation of the 1970s, and their focus on stable prices led to more than a decade of healthy disinflation. It was called “the great moderation.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/05/americas_transgender_craze_.html

Future historians may look back on 2023 as Peak Trans Women insanity. The highly publicized boycott of Bud Light beer over Anheuser-Busch’s choice to feature the trans “influencer” Dylan Mulvaney may have garnered the most publicity, but it is only a small part of this craze. This prominence is particularly visible in the fashion industry, where leading brands such as Chanel, Versace, and Victoria’s Secret now showcase biological men dressed as glamorous women. Even Sports Illustrated, a magazine targeting sports-minded men, once portrayed the transgender model, Leyna Bloom, on its cover. Thirty-sex transgendered women are currently earning a living as fashion models.

While portraying trans women in glossy magazines may attract more notice, more consequential is how biological males are replacing women in sports. It’s hard to know the numbers here, and some estimates put the figures on the low side (e.g., a 100 or so at the college level, five for K-12 ), but the impact extends beyond the raw numbers since biological men frequently dominate and thus deprive biological girls of financial rewards such as college scholarships or trophies.  A gay-oriented website summarizes this pattern with the headline,  “These 20 trans women have won national or international competitions or championships.” Who can forget the mediocre male swimmer Lia Thomas winning swimming championships as a female? Meanwhile, a trans weightlifter competed as a woman in the Olympics. A transgendered athlete recently defeated 14,000 female competitors in the London Marathon.

Far less publicized is that state prisons now contain 5000 men who identify as women while some 1300 are inmates of federal prisons.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-layoffs-jumped-in-march-as-job-openings-fell-3805c6a1

Construction, leisure and hospitality and healthcare cuts drive March increase in layoffs

U.S. job openings dropped to their lowest level in nearly two years in March and layoffs rose sharply, in signs that demand for workers is cooling a year after the Federal Reserve began lifting interest rates to combat inflation.

Layoffs rose to a seasonally adjusted 1.8 million in March from the prior month, up from a revised 1.6 million in February, the Labor Department said Tuesday. The increase was led by job losses in construction, leisure and hospitality and healthcare industries—sectors that have driven job growth in recent months as tech, finance and other white-collar industries cooled.

Employers also reported a seasonally adjusted 9.6 million job openings in March, the Labor Department said Tuesday, a decrease from a revised 10 million openings in February.

Openings reached their lowest level in March since April 2021 and are down from the record 12 million recorded last March. But they remain well above levels before the pandemic and exceed the 5.8 million unemployed people looking for work in March.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com
This essay was prompted by former deputy director of the CIA (2010-2013) Michael Morrell’s interview with House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) and House Intelligence Chairman Mike Turner (R-OH). In that interview Morell said he had phoned Antony Blinken in October 2020 about the Hunter Biden laptop story, which had appeared in the New York Post on October 14, 2020. A consequence of that call was that a few days before the 2020 election fifty-one former intelligence officers signed a public letter (a letter prepared by Morrell), which claimed that the Hunter Biden laptop story had all the classic earmarks of a Russian disinformation operation. As those officials have since acknowledged, the letter was written without any evidence of Russian involvement; yet those intelligence officers chose to propagate a false story to help Presidential candidate Joe Biden. Reporters from mainstream media were provided an out from having to follow up on the Hunter Biden laptop story. Integrity, where art thou?

Why, I wondered, would someone with Antony Blinken’s pedigree stoop to such a dirty trick?  At the time he was a senior advisor to the Biden campaign, with hopes of a position in a Biden administration. And why would fifty-one former intelligence officers do something that may have affected the outcome of a Presidential election? Is integrity as rare among Washington’s bureaucracy as it is among elected officials?