RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/maxine-waters-blew-sam-bankman-fried-a-kiss/

Sam Bankman-Fried, according to Victor Davis Hanson, “may have robbed perhaps a million investors, and along with them hundreds of large institutional investors.” He “protected from federal securities regulators, had drained off, lost, hidden, or spent billions of dollars of other people’s money.” Now his dear friend Maxine Waters (D-Incitement), who was caught on video blowing him a kiss in December 2021, will be leading an investigation into his sleazy FTX Ponzi scheme as Chair of the House Financial Services Committee. Waters initially stepped on a rake when she said that she wouldn’t be subpoenaing her pal Sam, but the winsome congresswoman backtracked after a firestorm and insisted that it was a “lie” that she didn’t plan to subpoena him. So will she actually do so? That remains unclear.

CNBC reported Wednesday that Waters “told the panel’s Democrats she doesn’t plan to subpoena former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried to testify at a Dec. 13 hearing about the crypto exchange’s rapid demise, according to people with direct knowledge of the conversation.” She “informed committee members of her decision at a private meeting Tuesday with Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler on Capitol Hill, these people said, declining to be named in order to speak freely about the private discussion.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/12/musk_has_some_new_faucibased_pronouns_that_you_are_going_to_love.html

Elon Musk has dropped another major revelation, this time about Anthony Fauci, the shriveled, malevolent bureaucrat who is responsible for profoundly damaging the American economy, destroying Americans’ health, and putting Biden in the White House. However, if the response from the left to this latest news continues to be the same response with which it greeted earlier Twitter revelations, we may finally have the answer to that old philosophical question: If a tree falls in an empty forest, does it make a sound?

To date, the Twitter documents have revealed that Twitter was working arm-in-arm with the Biden campaign, the Democrat party, and federal law enforcement to silence conservatives, including the President of the United States, to amplify Democrats, and to stifle any factual reporting that would reflect badly on Biden. The government bureaucrats, by colluding with Twitter to silence political speech, were violating the First Amendment. Meanwhile, Twitter was committing a fraud on the public (and its advertisers) by using covert means and lies (including lies to Congress) to hide its conduct perverting free speech in America.

What’s become clear is that Musk, taking a page out of Andrew Breitbart’s and James O’Keefe’s book, is steadily escalating the nature of the revelations. This is a technique that sees a promised expose start out kind of boring so that leftists can say, “That’s not news,” or “You already knew that,” or “Who cares?” However, as the story ever so slowly gains traction, the conservative outlet begins to produce more serious material highlighting gross misconduct.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/12/elon-musk-is-right/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

His vision for Twitter largely reflects the proper instincts about free speech and transparency.

A more transparent Twitter will be a better Twitter.

Forget, for a moment, the arguments over the First Amendment and Section 230, and look at the matter from the perspective of the consumer. Twitter is a business, and I am a customer, and from the perspective of a customer, I naturally prefer clarity to murkiness. As a daily user of the product, I gain nothing from opacity, or from complexity, or from caprice, because they all make the service worse for me. If I follow someone, I want to see their tweets. If I search for someone, I want to find their account. If a given topic or person or claim is trending, I want to know about it without its being filtered through the personal predilections of other people. Because Twitter is a platform on which people write, I want the staff who work there to be instinctively supportive of free expression, skeptical of government pressure, and loathe to tip the scales in either direction. And if, for whatever reason, some superintendence of my conversations is deemed necessary, I want to know about it without euphemisms.

If my account has been suppressed wholesale, I want to be told that. If my tweet is too offensive to be shared widely, I want to be informed of it. If I am no longer permitted to use the platform — whether temporarily or permanently — I want to be apprised of which rules I have broken and why. I have no legal or constitutional right to any of these provisions, nor would I claim one. Twitter is a private company, and I would like to keep it that way. But to accept that I cannot recruit the state to my side is not to shed all my opinions, and, as a user, I have a whole bunch of opinions to share.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/12/12/the-donald-makes-tim-cook-do-the-right-thing-again/

A popular game and teaching tool in various forms and guises – “What’s Missing from this Picture?” – seems highly applicable to a Wall Street Journal report that Apple Inc. “has accelerated plans to shift some of its production outside China.” The goal: “ship 40% to 45% of iPhones from India,” with manufacturing of “products such as AirPods, smartwatches and laptops” heading to Vietnam.

It seems Apple is perturbed – and judging by CEO Tim Cook’s studied reticence, embarrassed – by goings-on at factories of Chinese supplier Foxconn.

The Journal helpfully embedded video of authorities beating workers protesting weeks of COVID-driven imprisonment in their facility, closed-off break areas, and dining halls, and carryout meals they schlepped to dormitories a half-hour walk away.  Workers jumped fences to escape.

The article also cataloged the shortcomings of Vietnam – too small population-wise to match China’s manufacturing sites with hundreds of thousands of workers – and India – patchwork regulations that “saddle (Apple) with obligations.”

And, apparently, neither offers China’s “literate and diligent workforce, political stability” and “huge local market for Apple’s products.” Per an ex-Foxconn executive, “They’re not doing high-end phones in India and Vietnam. No other places can do them.”

“No other places,” eh? Catching on to “what’s missing in this picture?” Maybe a country with traditions of large-scale manufacturing and global leadership in “high-end phone” development? High levels of literacy, and laborers clocking some of the world’s longest workweeks? Not to mention the historically “hugest” market for Apple products?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-lawsuits-cost-you-3-600-a-year-tort-system-chamber-of-commerce-institute-for-legal-reform-report-11670460820?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

We always knew trial lawyers were filling their pockets, but it’s still a surprise to learn how much they’ve been emptying ours. The total economic cost of the U.S. tort system in 2020 was $443 billion, according to a recent study by the Chamber of Commerce Institute for Legal Reform. That’s 2.1% of GDP, and it works out to $3,621 per household.

Only a small percentage of American families are involved in tort cases or class-action lawsuits in a given year, but the burden of jackpot payouts is carried by nearly everyone. The costs spread through the economy in the form of higher insurance premiums that fall on nearly every family, either directly (car insurance) or indirectly (medical malpractice or product-liability insurance).

And costs are rising. Between 2016 and 2020 the tort system grew 6% a year, the study says, more than inflation and GDP growth. Commercial liability grew the fastest, at 7% a year. Also alarming is that only half the money goes to injured parties. “We estimate that only 53 percent of the total expenditures of the tort system were paid to claimants,” the authors write. In other words, “for every dollar paid in compensation to claimants, 88 cents were paid in legal and other costs.”

The boom in tort costs is owing to the boom in litigation financing, in which investors fund lawsuits and then claim a portion of the winnings.