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Ruth King

Chicken Wings for $34? Pent-Up Inflation Will Drive US Food Costs Even Higher Amy Yee and Tarso Veloso Ribeiro

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chicken-wings-34-pent-inflation-140006054.html

(Bloomberg) — With a gallon of milk up about 25% since before the pandemic, and retail bacon 35% higher, it’s hard to imagine how US food inflation could get any worse. But evidence suggests that even higher prices are on the horizon.

Consumers have actually been shielded so far from the full brunt of soaring expenses that are facing producers, distributors and small businesses like restaurants. But they can only hold back for so much longer.

Take the case of Jeff Good, who co-founded three restaurants in Jackson, Mississippi. Around 18 months ago, a 40-pound box of chicken wings cost him about $85. Now, it can go as high as roughly $150. Expenses for cooking oil and flour have nearly doubled in the past five months, he said. But it’s not just ingredient prices going up. He’s paying more for labor and services, too. Even the company that maintains his air conditioners has tacked on a $40 fuel charge per visit. To cope, he’s raised menu prices.

A 15-piece order of chicken wings, a signature dish at his Sal and Mookie’s pizzeria, went for $13.95 before Covid hit. Now, wing costs can vary so much they’re labeled at “market price,” like some restaurants do with lobster. At peaks, the menu price can be be about $27.95 — but that represents a barely-there margin — and Good estimates the “real cost” is closer to about $34. He’s trying to decide whether to keep raising prices or take wings off the menu.

“We have never, ever seen anything like what we’re seeing right now,” said Good, who opened his restaurants nearly 30 years ago.

The difference between prices received by producers for their goods and those paid by everyday customers at cash registers can be seen by comparing the producer and consumer price indices.

he CPI, a benchmark for gauging inflation cited in headlines and by economists, has been surging. Consumer prices for food rose 9.4% in April compared with a year earlier, the biggest gain since 1981, government data showed this month. There were record increases for chicken, fresh seafood and baby food.

Iran’s Ayatollahs’ Narco-Jihad against the USA Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

https://bit.ly/39WtPz5
”Many observers wonder how Iran, while in a difficult economic situation, can afford to finance a massive campaign to destabilize the region, as well as an extensive network of agents in the West. They should pay attention to the involvement of Iranian special services in the global drug trafficking [and mega-billion-dollar money laundering]….”

“A commercial jetliner from Venezuela’s state-run Conviasa Airline flew from Caracas to Tehran via Damascus, Syria, every week with a cargo-hold full of drugs and cash, nicknamed “Aeroterror,” because the return flight often carried weapons and was packed with Hezbollah and Iranian operatives whom the Venezuelan government would provide with fake identities and travel documents on their arrival…. From there, the operatives spread throughout the subcontinent….”

Shiite clerics in Iran and Lebanon have determined that narco-trafficking is morally acceptable when drugs are sold to Western “infidels,” and especially to “The Great American Satan.” They have concluded that drugs may be more effective a weapon than guns.

Iran’s Ayatollahs bite the hand that feeds them

*In 1979, President Carter assumed that Iran’s Ayatollahs were amenable to peaceful coexistence. Therefore, he turned against the Shah of Iran – who was “America’s Policeman in the Persian Gulf” – and provided a tailwind to their rise to power, since “they would be preoccupied with tractors, not with tanks.”  However, as expected, upon toppling the Shah of Iran, the Ayatollahs regime bit the hand that fed them, and leveraged the critical US support to transforming Iran into the lead epicenter of anti-US terrorism and drug trafficking, highlighting rogue operations in Latin America, the US’ soft underbelly.

Trans dogma has taken over our schools A teenager has been hounded out of her sixth-form for saying that biological sex exists. Joanna Williams

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/05/17/trans-dogma-has-taken-over-our-schools/

A baroness gave a talk to sixth-form students at a private girls’ school a few weeks ago. Afterwards, one girl was surrounded by a large group of her fellow pupils. They shouted, screamed, swore and spat at her. She escaped, but then collapsed, unable to breathe properly.

The word ‘bullying’ is thrown around lightly nowadays. Children see themselves as victims of bullying if they feel left out. Bosses who put staff under pressure to meet deadlines stand accused of bullying. Mostly these are just unpleasant experiences. But a pupil being targeted, surrounded, sworn and spat at by her classmates is surely a clear-cut case of bullying.

So in this instance, we might have expected teachers – fully trained-up in all the latest anti-bullying guidance – to intervene and put a stop to the targeted girl’s misery, yes? We would have expected her to be looked after and her tormentors punished, right?

But no. That’s not how things actually played out at all. Rather than being supported by her teachers, the targeted pupil – the girl surrounded by the baying mob – has been ‘driven out’ of school. And rather than her tormentors being punished, they have been treated as victims. Incredibly, the school’s headteacher reportedly apologised to the sixth-formers involved for ‘failing to maintain a “safe space” and for being seen to spend so much time giving support to [the bullied student]’, who by this point had been ‘isolated to the library’ for her own safety.

The heretical pupil in question apparently committed a crime so morally heinous that the spitting and swearing were considered an almost justifiable response. Following the baroness’s talk on ‘transphobia in parliament’, the girl at the centre of the row dared to question the orthodoxies of gender identity. She even had the temerity to suggest that sex may be biological and immutable. These thought crimes led her to be branded a transgressor who deserved punishment.

Woke is truly going broke. Netflix is just the latest casualty Roger Kimball

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/woke-is-truly-going-broke/

It looks like Susan Sontag was ahead of her time. Back in 1966, she (in)famously wrote that “the white race is the cancer of human history.” (After her own bout with cancer a few years later she emended that statement, noting that, on reflection, she thought it was unfair — to cancer.)

Back then, such statements were “provocative,” a euphemism for outrageously mendacious. But it wasn’t long before lots of white liberals, abetted by sundry black race-hustlers, got in on the game. To accompany its 1993 biennial exhibition, the Whitney Museum of American Art passed out little pins that said, “I Can’t Imagine Ever Wanting to Be White.” It was fun to watch all the white females in black boots, bad hairdos and ill-fitting clothes trudge scowling through the galleries sporting that declaration of ideological submission.

Nowadays, of course, anti-white animus is all the rage wherever tribal wokeness accumulates and pools. “Critical Race Theory,” which began life in the academy, has metastasized down into primary school, throughout the corporate world and even into various agencies of the federal government where “workshops” (that’s English for what Maoists called “struggle sessions”) are convened to provide cathartic opportunities to declare and abominate one’s “whiteness” and the fifty shades of one’s “privilege.”

Racial aphrodisiacs like Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist (in a nutshell, practice anti-white racism) and Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism fill the marketplace of stale ideas while Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, skirls about “white rage” and frantic exercises in malicious historical fantasy like the New York Times’s 1619 Project poison the hearts and minds of students across the country.

The Chinese have come up with one of the most penetrating epithets to describe this sickness. In 2010, some clever Chinese coined the term baizuo, which literally means “white left” but really means “sanctimonious liberal dysphoria.” It’s a menu-driven pathology in which, in the words of the political scientist Chenchen Zhang, “hypocritical humanitarians… advocate political correctness just to satisfy their own sense of moral superiority.” A rancid pity is the motor of this enterprise — pity, and an unearned sense of forever unexpiated guilt. “Culpability suits us,” the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner observes, “it provides an alibi for our abdication.”

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: – – SUFFERING THE WORTHLESSNESS OF WOKEISM

https://www.tothepointnews.com/2022/05/suffering-the-worthlessness-of-wokeism/

We are witnessing a number of radical military, social, and political revolutions that are changing the United States—and the world—in fundamental ways that we still have not appreciated.

The taboo about never mentioning the first-strike use of nuclear weapons in a major conventional war is now apparently over. Vladimir Putin routinely threatens their use. Communist China hints at its growing nuclear capability and is hell-bent on rushing into production a huge new nuclear missile force. The world is defining nuclear incineration down.

The more China and North Korea talk about nukes, the more necessary it is that uneasy democracies such as Australia, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan will make adjustments. And the more the United States bows out of its prior role of extending its nuclear umbrella over Western democracies, the more likely these societies will consider going nuclear themselves.

Should Iran acquire nuclear weapons—and its patrons Russia and China seem to be ensuring that it will—then the long feared but heretofore never reified nuclear Middle East arms race will finally break out, as the petro-rich Arab world tries to deter Iran’s unhinged theocrats.

There is also a revolutionary vacuum occurring abroad. Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea are trying to figure out whether there is still any old-style American deterrence, or whether the woke progressives now in power in Washington dislike the customs and traditions of the United States even more than they do.

Lots of disasters have contributed to the current perilous state of affairs, including the precipitous American retreat from and humiliation in Afghanistan. Add in voluntary cutbacks in oil and gas production by the West, and the subsequent embarrassment of a superpower beseeching thuggish regimes such as Venezuela to send us their energy.

The politicized transformation of the U.S. military from a meritocratic force focused on wartime lethality into an extension of the social welfare state driven by diversity, equity and inclusion has encouraged our enemies to take risks they otherwise might not have taken.

Why Erdoğan’s NATO Blackmail Is Subversion by Burak Bekdil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18541/erdogan-nato-blackmail

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, is trying to turn what appears to be the most strategic move in NATO’s history into carpet-trading at Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar.

“The Russian-Kurdish nexus has been a recurring feature of Middle Eastern geopolitics for more than two hundred years, since Catherine the Great commissioned the publication of a Kurdish grammar in 1787.” — Michael A. Reynolds, The National Interest, March 1, 2016.

None of the many examples of Russian appeasement of Turkey’s “Kurdish terrorists” is secret. Russia has been doing all it could for its Kurdish friends overtly, with Erdoğan completely silent. Now the same Erdoğan is by trying to blackmail NATO by vetoing membership for two Western European countries on the grounds that these countries, threatened by Russia, are supporting Kurdish terrorists.

The Western military alliance should be strong enough to tell Erdoğan what he needs to hear.

Once again, Turkey is the odd one out in the NATO alliance. The country’s Islamist strongman, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, is trying to turn what appears to be the most strategic move in NATO’s history into carpet-trading at Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar.

How Did We Get Here? Rebecca Sugar

https://whiterosemagazine.com/how-did-we-get-here/

Lots of Jews seem to be paying attention to Jewish life in America in a new way now. Rashida Tlaib, “Apartheid Week” on college campuses, social media influencers, Colleyville, and much more have come together in critical mass and shoved these “twice-a-year Jews” into the figurative Jewish communal room, many for the first time. They are stumbling around, wondering how we got here and what to do next. “I can’t believe this is happening here, in the United States,” they say in disbelief. 

But, actually, it isn’t at all hard to believe. After all, “this” has been happening here for a while. “This” has also happened in almost every Diaspora Jewish community throughout history. If by “this” they mean the scapegoating of Jews during turbulent times, and the subsequent increase in anti-Semitic activity, then “this” is neither new nor surprising. In fact, it is perfectly predictable.  

What most American Jews are really shocked by, but couldn’t see until it became inescapably obvious, is the fast-growing, unabashed anti-Semitism of the American political left, where they themselves reside. BDS, the Squad, attacks on Hassidic Jews in the streets, BLM’s charter, Pinkwashing, Deadly Exchange, leadership at the Women’s March, biased mainstream media coverage of Israel, anti-Semitic professors at elite private high schools, Islamist apologists: it has all felt like a sudden landslide. But, in fact, it has been more like a slow, creeping mudslide that they seem to have entirely missed, until it appeared as a daily feature on their social media feeds. Why do American Jews seem so caught off guard?

What most American Jews are really shocked by, but couldn’t see until it became inescapably obvious, is the fast-growing, unabashed anti-Semitism of the American political left, where they themselves reside.

One explanation is historical ignorance. It’s usually a bad blind spot. If you didn’t study Soviet Jewry, perhaps it is difficult to understand that political collectivism is bad for the Jews. If you didn’t learn about the implications of group “identity politics” in 19th and 20th century Europe, you might not appreciate that the contemporary American manifestation of it is a threat to the Jewish community and Israel. If you don’t know that the image of the money-hungry, usurious Jew is an anti-Semitic slur hundreds of years old, then when Ilhan Omar says, “it’s all about the Benjamins” you might think the comment was an offensive, one-off remark you can overlook. These trends have been building for some time, but if you didn’t have historical sensitivity to them, you wouldn’t guess that the politics you support are also hurting Jews. Then, when your favorite ice cream brand suddenly decides to boycott Israel, it comes as a shock.

The Jewish Community Cannot Survive Perfidy by its Leadership Avi Goldwasser Charles Jacobs

https://whiterosemagazine.com/the-jewish-community-cannot-survive-perfidy-by-its-leadership/

This is not the country we grew up in. The Jewish community is under siege. According to the FBI, Jews are the primary targets of hate crimes in America. An analysis of their reports reveals that a Jew is twice as likely to be a victim of a hate crime as a black person or a Muslim, ten times more likely than an Asian or a Latino, and twenty times more likely than a non-Hispanic white.

Jews are being beaten in the streets of New York City, murdered in Pittsburgh, San Diego, and Jersey City, stabbed in Boston, taken hostage in Texas, and harassed and bullied on college campuses across the country. In more than a few places, Jews live with rising anxiety. Most Jewish community buildings require security. Israel, the Jewish state, is defamed and demonized by the mainstream media, and maligned in both the U.S. Congress and the United Nations, as anti-Zionism becomes the new anti-Semitism. 

Hostility toward American Jews continues to grow. In February 2022, police in New York reported that anti-Semitic hate crimes in the city were up 409 percent. A recent American Jewish Committee (AJC) poll found that four in ten Jews avoid making themselves identifiable as Jews, avoid going to Jewish events, or refrain from posting Jewish-related content online. Ninety percent of Jews think anti-Semitism is a problem in America.  

In what seems like a perfect storm, Jews face assaults simultaneously from four major ideological camps. Lethal white nationalists attack them in the name of white supremacy, blaming them for supporting multiculturalism and rising Third World immigration. Radical black nationalists—including Farrakhan-following celebrities, academics, and politicians—attack Jews in the name of black liberation and “equity.” Radical progressives and segments of the Democratic Party promote the genocidal BDS movement and anti-Jewish critical race theory, inciting an ideological assault on Israel and Jews in the name of “social justice” and Palestinian nationalism. This new assault is a kind of “virtuous Jew-hatred,” socially acceptable and even fashionable, not easily countered by facts, logic, or reason.

In what seems like a perfect storm, Jews face assaults simultaneously from four major ideological camps.

Clarence Thomas Reveals When He Plans to Leave the Supreme Court By Matt Margolis

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/05/17/clarence-thomas-reveals-when-he-plans-to-leave-the-supreme-court-n1598613

In recent weeks, left-wing activists have been calling for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from the bench or resign because of his wife’s activism in conservative politics.

Over the weekend, Justice Thomas revealed when he actually plans to leave the Supreme Court, and a lot of people aren’t going to be happy about it.

“One of the things I say in response to the media, when they talk about, especially early on … about the way I do my job, I said, ‘I will absolutely leave the Court when I do my job as poorly as you do yours.’ And that was meant as a compliment, really,” Thomas said during an interview at a conference in Dallas.

“It really is good to be me. It really is,” he added.

Biden’s Acting NIH Director Refuses To Condemn Chemically Castrating Kids Despite Irreversible Damage By: Jordan Boyd

https://thefederalist.com/2022/05/17/bidens-acting-nih-director-refuses-to-condemn-chemically-castrating-kids-despite-irreversible-damage/

Lawrence Tabak, the acting director of the National Institutes of Health, doubled down on the Biden administration’s push to institutionalize chemical castration and other gender experiments on children Tuesday after Republican Sen. Marco Rubio questioned him on the irreversible damage those dangerous procedures can cause.

As Rubio noted in the congressional hearing, so-called “gender transforming care” is “not an FDA-approved use for puberty blockers and hormone therapy” yet the Biden administration is openly endorsing it and pushing it on American minors.

“As NIH is America’s medical research agency, what work have we done to determine if this non-FDA approved use of these medicines, this off-label use of these medicines, is appropriate for minors seeking ‘gender transforming care?’” Rubio asked.

In response, Tabak parroted “observational” NIH-funded studies, some of which were specifically “designed to justify chemically sterilizing children who suffer from gender confusion or dysphoria,” as Jane Robbins and Erin Tuttle reported for The Federalist in 2018.

“NIH funds a small number of observational studies to gather the data on the effects of treatments that transgender youth and their parents have chosen. And there are also a small number of studies that describe the health issues and risks, including HIV, that are unique to these transgender youth. But all of the research in this space is observational. We do no interventional work,” Tabak said.