RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/25/highways-to-utopia/

EXCERPTS:

At some point, the West really will decline. Is it finally happening? And what is this “West” that is “declining,” “closing,” facing a momentous crossroads? An incomplete but not inaccurate shorthand is “Christendom.” I know that the term strikes an antique note in America circa 2022. When is the last time you heard someone utter it without invisible scare quotes? (When was the last time you heard someone utter it at all?) But a decaying moral vocabulary—consider the recent career of words like “virtue,” “manliness,” “womanly,” or “respectable”—is part of the ominous cargo we are called upon to bear. As for “Christendom,” it names a dispensation in which the individual possesses intrinsic moral worth, defined not only by the Christian tradition itself but buoyed also by those traditions, predominantly classical and Judaic, which flowed into and helped nurture and define that baggy creation we call “the West.” 

One bleak route on the crossroads we face involves the willful throttling of those mighty currents. Angry at the Gyndes River for sweeping away and drowning one of his sacred white horses, Cyrus decided to punish the river by having his slaves cut 360 channels into it, stanching its flow to a trickle. This we have done to ourselves, applying mental tourniquets to the arteries that fed us from the past in order that we might gambol undisturbed in distracted present-tense ignorance. An illustrative case in point is the Princeton classics department, where woke educationists panting for relevance recently jettisoned the requirement that its students learn Latin or Greek, never mind both. At the same time, they publicly celebrate the 57 varieties of racial-trans-wonderfulness that have become the focus of academic obsession. It is a situation that is as absurd as it is malignant. In The Present Age (1846), Kierkegaard described the jaded spirit that “leaves everything standing but cunningly empties it of significance.” That is where we are today: occupying a husk of decadence assiduously emptied of vitality. Princeton, Yale, Harvard, and the rest of the querulous educational establishment are sodden with money but spiritually and intellectually bankrupt. They continue to look like educational institutions: leafy walks, imposing libraries, impressive buildings. But most of the activities they sponsor are inimical to real education, inciting thousands of puny Cyruses to divert and stymie the waters of tradition in order to polish the mirror of their narcissism. 

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/disputed_questions/how-can-we-fix-inflation.html#supply-side-inflation-and-its-cures

The Federal Reserve failed to anticipate the worst inflation since the 1970s and is now administering medicine that will sicken rather than cure the patient. As Fed Chair Jerome Powell said recently: “Restoring price stability will take some time and requires using our tools forcefully to bring demand and supply into better balance. Reducing inflation is likely to require a sustained period of below-trend growth. Moreover, there will very likely be some softening of labor market conditions.”

This is entirely misguided: unlike the 1970s, today’s inflation is the result of too little labor and too little capital investment – in manufacturing as well as energy. To a great extent, it is a supply-side problem. Discouraging employment and investment by raising interest rates will only make things worse. What the United States requires, rather, is incentives for investment and employment in manufacturing and construction.

The impulse from inflation came from a fiscal shock in the form of federal transfer payments in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

With a lag of zero to six quarters, transfer payments show a high correlation with year-on-year changes in the Consumer Price Index, as in the cross-correlogram above. A predictive equation that relates year-on-year changes in CPI with lagged values of transfer payments explains most of the change in CPI.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19157/nation-confidence-in-ruler

“Tsekung asked about government and Confucius replied: ‘People must have sufficient to eat; there must be a sufficient army; and there must be confidence of people in the ruler.’ ‘If you are forced to give up one of these three objectives, what would you go without first,’ asked Tsekung. Confucius said, ‘ I would go without the army first.’ ‘And if you were forced to go without one of the two remaining factors, what would you rather go without,’ asked Tsekung again. ‘I would rather go without sufficient food for the people…. [A] nation cannot exist without confidence in its ruler.'”
— From The Wisdom of China and India by Lin Yutang.

Our election integrity is under assault, as is our Constitution. We have lost confidence in our rulers. We have lost confidence in how we elect our rulers. As of this writing, the US midterm election has been over for more than two weeks; in Arizona, which reported massive voting problems – from voting machines that failed to work to “mixed ballots” — the result still has not been tallied. We have lost confidence in mail-in ballots — a reservation about which the Carter Commission warned in 2005; in ballot-harvesting and “ballot hunting” as opposed to verifiable voting with one-man-one-vote. We have lost confidence in the hundreds of “dirty,” uncleaned voter rolls and the lack of voter identification in many states.

Most of all we have lost confidence in the millions of political dollars such as Mark Zuckerberg’s “Zuckbucks”, provided privately, where $400 million, laundered through supposedly non-governmental organizations, effectively “swung” elections in Georgia. Now, they are available “on steroids.” After 25 states ruled out private political donations such as Zuckbucks, the Biden administration put $370 billion in public funds — nearly a thousand times what Zuckerberg used — in the hands of long-time Democrat political operative John Podesta, to be disbursed at his discretion, ostensibly for climate change. What cannot be said out loud is that the climate change NGOs that hope to receive this bounty,will most likely be asked quietly to agree that a goodly percentage of what they get be used to “educate” voters in districts known through gerrymandering to be sympathetic.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/ryanledendecker/2022/11/24/bidens-crushing-inflation-spikes-household-credit-card-debt-to-new-heights-n1648436

The Biden administration has worked overtime to gaslight Americans into believing everything is totally fine when, in fact, everything is not fine. As a matter of fact, it’s getting worse by the day. And by “it’s,” I mean everything is going south.

The latest indication of yet another looming economic crisis — and no, I’m not talking about the developing housing crisis, the diesel fuel crisis, the home heating oil crisis, the inflation crisis, or the illegal immigration crisis — was revealed in a startling report this week regarding total household credit card debt, which has now increased by the most in 20 years, rising a staggering 15% from last year.

The crazy part? The debt has increased at record levels even as interest rates have been pumped higher by the Fed over the past several months.

In other words, under President Joe Biden’s grossly failing economy, many of us are being forced to use available credit — even at record-high interest rates — to buy the things we’ve always bought. Nobody’s buying extra stuff.

This is a direct result of savings accounts being drained because of Bidenflation. We’ve simply run out of cash. And good luck trying to liquidate your fun, expendable assets, like boats, motorcycles, and RVs, because most people can’t afford to buy them.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19153/elizabeth-holmes-sentence

It was a strange mixed verdict because those she was acquitted of defrauding needed more protection from the law than those she was convicted of defrauding.

This is not to deny that even these financial gamblers are entitled to legal protection against fraud, despite the well-known caution of caveat emptor. It is to question the proportionality of a double-digit sentence in the face of the acquittal on the far more serious charge.

A wealthy investor who loses a million dollars, representing one percent of his net worth, has lost less than a middle-class investor who loses $100,000, representing half of his assets. Yet the sentencing guidelines undervalue these realities. The irony is that Holmes might well have gotten a shorter sentence if she had been convicted only of the more serious crimes….

The guidelines give far too much weight to the quantity of financial losses, and too little to the qualitative realities of the risky investment world.

Elizabeth Holmes, the Silicon Valley wonderkid who founded and ran Theranos, the blood testing company, was sentenced last week to 11 years in prison. A jury acquitted her of the most serious charges related to defrauding government and military officials regarding the use of the Theranos device by soldiers. But it convicted her of defrauding highly sophisticated, experienced and mega-wealthy investors.