RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/inflation-heating-bills-this-winter-energy-costs-rising-2022/

Across the U.S., families are looking to the winter with dread as energy costs soar and fuel supplies tighten.

The Department of Energy is projecting sharp price increases for home heating compared with last winter and some worry whether heating assistance programs will be able to make up the difference for struggling families. The situation is even bleaker in Europe, with Russia’s continued curtailment of natural gas pushing prices upward and causing painful shortages.

In Maine, Aaron Raymo saw the writing on the wall and began stocking up on heating oil in 5-gallon increments over the summer as costs crept upward. He filled a container with heating oil as he could afford it, usually on paydays, and used a heating assistance program to top off his 275-gallon oil tank with the arrival of colder weather.

His family is trying to avoid being forced into a difficult decision — choosing between food or heating their home.

“It’s a hard one,” he said. “What are you going to choose for food, or what amount of fuel oil are you going to choose to stay warm?”

What’s driving up heating costs

A number of factors are converging to create a bleak situation: Global energy consumption has rebounded from the start of the pandemic, and supply was barely keeping pace before the war in Ukraine further reduced supplies.

The National Energy Assistance Directors Association says energy costs will be the highest in more than a decade this winter.

The Energy Department projects heating bills will jump 28% this winter for those who rely on natural gas, used by nearly half of U.S. households for heat. Heating oil is projected to be 27% higher and electricity 10% higher, the agency said.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/20/the-commie-trains-acomin/

Several large American cities have contracted with a Chinese state-owned rail car manufacturer to design and manufacture subway cars for their subway systems, raising serious cybersecurity and human-rights concerns. Over the past eight years, China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation (CRRC) has secured more than $2.6 billion in federal transit contracts to provide passenger railcars in Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia.

Lawmakers from both parties have taken notice, and are now demanding that the Biden Administration take action to prevent a company that has links to the Chinese military from dominating the railcar market in the United States.

CRRC, the world’s largest rolling stock manufacturer, has a headquarters in Springfield, Massachusetts (CRRC MA), and a production facility in Chicago (CRRC Sifang America). The Chinese state-owned company is reportedly controlled by the communist People’s Liberation Army (PLA), and has been identified as a threat to U.S. economic and national security. CRRC also has been called out repeatedly for human rights and labor violations.

CRRC’s use of brutal, anti-competitive tactics has given it the ability to offer bargain-basement prices that U.S. transportation agencies have found irresistible. The company allegedly uses the slave labor of Uyghur Muslim minorities in its factories, and child labor to mine for a mineral used in manufacturing its railcars.

In April 2019, retired U.S. Army Brigadier General John Adams wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post advising the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority to reject CRRC’s bid for its next series of rail cars.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19009/profits-patriotism

Today’s American mega-billionaires need to think long and hard about where their allegiances lie: perhaps reciting the Pledge of Allegiance before our nation’s flag might be a good place to start.

If past history is any indication, their current corporate behavior will become their personal legacy illuminated under a harsh and revealing spotlight.

American industrial giants, General Motors and Ford, found that to be the case when lawyers dug through national archives in the 1990s and discovered documents that revealed how these two corporations had their German-based subsidies working hand-in-glove with the Nazi regime both before World War II and during the conflict.

Company spokesmen were quick to suggest that those firms were operating at a distance but researchers begged to differ. History records that there is reason to be skeptical of corporate “spin.”

IBM also found itself being questioned about its business relationship with the Nazi regime. A 2002 report that found that its computing machines helped the Third Reich managing to commit mass murder on an industrial scale.

Today, social media founders such as Mark Zuckerberg need to think long and hard about their corporate relationships with countries such as China — nations that seek to assume the role of a global superpower at the expense of the United States. Published reports reveal that Zuckerberg has long regarded China as a crucial market for his products, only to find that the Chinese may now be seeking to “out-Zuckerberg” him by developing their own online “virtual universe” – a massive undertaking that Zuckerberg has sought to introduce as his next very big (and presumably very profitable) venture.

What he and other corporate executives are learning is that profits at the expense of patriotism is a dangerous game to play. The dividends for such a strategy will eventually be revealed to all and history will ask, “At what price was your nation’s future put at risk?”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/civilization-cannot-exist-without-righteous-retribution/

The only thing about the fact that a jury found that the degenerate scumbag who murdered seventeen people should not be executed is that it was just one nimrod juror who held out not to give the vermin the death he deserves. Statistically, even in a red state like Florida, it’s difficult to find a group of twelve people without a moral illiterate or two. In blue venues, it’s hard to find any moral literates at all.

Here’s the thing – a civilization that cannot come up with the moral testicularity to execute a creature who murders over a dozen of its children is a civilization in serious trouble. The minimum standard for any culture that intends on surviving – and surviving means dealing with the barbarians within and without – is to take its own side in the fight for survival. Eventually, there will be a backlash. The only question is how ugly it will be.

This injustice in the Sunshine State – appropriately deplored by Governor DeSantis – is a symptom of the larger problem. You see it manifested across our culture – suicidal tolerance and performative forgiveness. In places like Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and other blue cities – it is always blue cities – the inhabitants murder each other with glee. But more than that, they generally act like savages. We have all seen the videos. Random creeps menacing citizens on the subways, packs of thugs raiding convenience stores or shopping malls, pitched battles between groups of aspiring Einsteins in Walmarts, animals cold-cocking citizens who are simply minding their own business. But no one stops them. No one holds them to account. The cops’ shrug, because the blue politicians have told them to stand down. The answer to those of us who protest is always the same – shut up, racist, and also give us your guns so that you cannot defend yourself from what the government refuses to suppress.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/january-6-committee-doubles-as-november-8-committee-11666297630?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

If the average American voter cared about the Capitol riot committee, she might wonder whether the committee’s members or its targets are more loathsome. All along, citizens have had to either laugh or cry at the spectacle of federal election deniers leading an investigation of federal election denial. But is the partisan congressional committee now interfering in a state campaign?

As for the deniers conducting these proceedings, committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D., Miss.) was among the 31 Democrats who sought to prevent the certification of the re-election of President George W. Bush in 2005.

Committee stalwart Rep. Jamie Raskin (D., Md.) has a long history of refusing to accept Republican wins. He recommended dismantling the Electoral College after the 2000 election and after the 2016 election he attempted to prevent the certification of Donald Trump’s victory and then boycotted the inauguration.

And who could forget Rep. Adam Schiff (D., Calif.), who helped poison our politics by spending years falsely claiming to have “more than circumstantial evidence” of Trump campaign collusion with Russia?

After this season’s final hearing was rescheduled to avoid competing for television viewers with hurricane coverage, one might have thought the partisan shenanigans were finally drawing to a close for this oddball committee comprised exclusively of Democrats and Democrat-approved Republicans. But now there’s a question involving the surprisingly tight gubernatorial race in New York.

https://www.renewamerica.com/columns/sharpe/221019

By one of life’s odd coincidences, I recently finished watching Clint Eastwood’s movie on the rise to power of J. Edgar Hoover when I came across a commentary written by J. R. Nyquist in his blog titled, The Time Traveler’s Lesson. It was of an imaginary interrogation by Hoover himself of a man taken into custody by the FBI claiming to be from the future and describing America in the year 2016.

Back in 1964 and upon hearing the time traveler’s description, Hoover exploded in outrage finding the account the most egregious nonsense he had ever heard. No doubt, Hoover concluded, the man’s description of life in the United States 52 years hence was an unmitigated hoax or the man was certifiably insane. But what was it that the time traveler described which so shocked J. Edgar Hoover?

America in the future would be led for eight years by a man with the partly Arabic name of Barack Hussein Obama who was mentored as a youth by a suspected Communist named Frank Marshall Davis.

The time traveler went on to explain that the leading social question of 2016 would be gay marriage. Hoover angrily asked if it was thought by some to be funny to play such a practical joke on the FBI?

Nor did Hoover credit the time traveler’s absurd claim that the national debt was more than $17 trillion in 2016, or that Venezuela and Nicaragua had been quietly taken over by Fidel Castro’s friends, that Zimbabwe, Angola, South Africa along with the Congo were now in the hands of African Communists, or that North Korea possessed nuclear weapons. None of this was believable. None of it made any sense to someone living in 1964 during the Cold War.

When the time traveler finally reported that the United States was reduced to a state of manufacturing inferiority to Red China, there was an abrupt end to the interview. Hoover angrily exclaimed, ”What self-respecting American official in 1964 could possibly allow himself to be so insolently abused?”

https://openthebooks.substack.com/p/historic-release-dr-anthony-faucis

On Tuesday, January 14, 2020 at 9am, Dr. Anthony Fauci joined staff at the National Security Council (NSC) — the President’s national security and foreign policy advisory shop — for a meeting in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building about the novel coronavirus. Fauci would continue to have meetings in classified settings throughout the month.

Fauci’s calendar entries included NSC meetings, White House Situation Room meetings, and meetings in other classified settings, as Covid-19 was breaking in China. (To our knowledge, the existence of these meetings before January 28, 2020 were not previously disclosed.)

On Friday, January 24th, four days after China admitted human-to-human transmission of the virus, Fauci started attending a small group Covid discussion that first took place in “Anthony’s Office” in a building next to the White House. Anthony, in this case, appears to be an NSC employee and an expert in biodefense and China.

Flashing back to December 2019, when patients in Wuhan were showing up at hospitals with unidentified pneumonia cases, Fauci attended the National Institutes of Health — Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation dinner and workshops on December 19 and 20th – the sixth annual event for NIH staff and Gates Foundation executives.

On the morning of the 19th, billionaire Bill Gates tweeted out his own hopes for the coming year and his now prescient prediction: “one of the best buys in global health: vaccines.”

Today, we only know about these meetings, because our organization at OpenTheBooks.com, in partnership with the public-interest law firm Judicial Watch, sued the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in federal court. NIH had refused to even acknowledge our Freedom of Information Act request.

So, for the first time, here is our exclusive release of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s official calendar:

https://www.city-journal.org/progressives-awakening-from-defund-the-police-nightmare?wallit_nosession=1

Over the past few weeks, several top progressive commentators have completely reversed their views on “defunding police” and adopted a more tough-on-crime approach. Most notably, Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian—key figures of the premier progressive outlet The Young Turks—have awakened to the grim consequences of the policies they initially supported.

Uygur recently posted a viral tweet lambasting the “defund the police” movement as “wildly counterproductive framing” and asking progressives when they will “admit they were wrong?” These statements contrast starkly with Uygur’s tweets during the nationwide George Floyd protests: “I’m done. I’m now supporting #DefundThePolice 100%. I already agreed with the substance of the argument & now I’m down for the framing, too.”

The irony of Uygur’s recent statement is that he fails to answer the very question he poses to the Left: he has not acknowledged that he was wrong. In fact, prominent liberal commentators on platforms from The Young Turks to CNN helped popularize the movement that led to massive cuts to police department budgets in 2020. Major cities such as New York City, Los Angeles, Seattle, Austin, and San Francisco slashed funding for their departments amid an unprecedented rise in officer retirements and low officer morale. The financial, cultural, legal, and psychological ramifications of the Black Lives Matter-fueled defund-police movement correlated with record-breaking 30 percent rise in homicides in 2020, followed by another 6 percent rise last year.

Meantime, Uygur’s fellow Young Turks commentator Ana Kasparian has generated a progressive social media backlash for criticizing soft-on-crime prosecution in California. In a clip that went viral on Twitter, Kasparian decries the events leading up to 20-year-old Carlos Delcid’s alleged killing of an off-duty Monterey Park police officer last month. Before the shooting, Delcid had been sentenced to 180 days in prison, but L.A. district attorney George Gascón dropped three of the five felony charges (including witness intimidation, false imprisonment, and assault with a deadly weapon), resulting in his release the next day.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/10/21/bidens-lies-about-energy-can-no-longer-be-ignored/

It’s stunning to hear President Biden (and the rest of the Democrats) spin our growing energy crisis. Like a child with his hand caught in the cookie jar, Biden continually tells the American people, “I didn’t do it!” In fact, yes he did. And he still is.

“Let’s debunk some myths: My administration has not stopped or slowed U.S. oil production,” Biden said on Wednesday, adding that he’s “doing everything in my power to reduce gasoline prices.”

Is that true? In fact, the entire energy policy of the Biden administration has been directed at not just slowing, but stopping U.S. oil production. The intended result: Higher gasoline prices for consumers, yet another Bidenflation tax on American families that is already pushing many to the brink of financial insolvency.

That’s not a partisan talking point, by the way. Even his own administration’s energy officials admit that the goal of the administration is to get rid of fossil fuels by raising prices. They just don’t want it now, before the 2022 midterm elections.

Oil output must be limited in order to “make sure that we’re in a better footing to accelerate the transition,” said Amos Hochstein, Biden’s Special Presidential Coordinator for International Energy Affairs.

By the way, we wrote about this back in March of this year, when Biden was fixated on blaming Russia’s dictator Vladimir Putin for our self-inflicted energy woes.

“Putin’s war is already hurting American families at the gas pump . . . I’m going to do everything I can to minimize Putin’s price hike here at home,” Biden said, as he banned Russian oil imports.

Just as he did back then, Biden this week blamed U.S. oil companies for the energy mess.

“You’re sitting on record profits and we’re giving you more certainty so you can act now to increase oil production now,” Biden said.

More certainty? Record profits? Sure enough, as energy prices soared recently, quarterly oil company profits jumped along with them. But that’s only part of the story.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/20/is-the-red-wave-back/

In the dog days of summer, as Joe Biden’s average approval rating plummeted to historic lows amid an intense flurry of national setbacks, policy blunders, and rhetorical “gaffes” (otherwise known as palpable senility), most in the punditry class began to predict an imminent “red wave” of Republican electoral dominance in November’s midterm elections.

The midterms that take place two years after a new presidency typically favor the opposition party, after all, and certain data—such as the four-decade-high inflation rate that was, and still is, raging like wildfire—pointed in the direction of a strong ballot-box backlash to one-party Democratic rule. At that time, we could also add in an “eyeball test” of sorts: Uncle Joe was (and still is), quite simply, way too old and way too bad at this.

Then, from late July through Labor Day weekend in early September, the momentum seemed to shift a bit toward the incumbent party. Democrats largely outperformed expectations in special elections in Nebraska, Minnesota and New York, and the culturally conservative state of Kansas resoundingly rejected a pro-life attempt to amend the state’s constitution to democratize the abortion issue and let the state legislature decide Kansas abortion policy.

In general, for about four to six weeks, we began to see enough data trickle in to suggest that a “Dobbs backlash”—whereby the U.S. Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade would have the effect of energizing and mobilizing progressive voters—might really be in the offing. Some promising Republican Senate candidates in reliably Trumpy states, such as J. D. Vance in Ohio, seemed to be failing to gain polling traction. The punditocracy switched gears: The “red wave” might simply be a shapeless “purple drip.” (Some of us, it must be said, suggested that little had actually changed.)