RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/23/the-economic-doom-loop-has-begun/

High inflation, overregulation, and a general sense that things are going in the wrong direction remind us of the late 1970s and early ’80s. But today the underlying problems that were responsible for our woes in that time are vastly worse. The coming reckoning for Washington’s insanely irresponsible monetary policy may dwarf the troubles from all recent recessions and periods of inflation. 

The Federal Reserve has created a doom loop between the housing market and inflation. For years it has printed tens of billions of dollars each month to buy sketchy securities meant to subsidize the housing market and favor bond traders. This continues even now, in spite of inflation and a red-hot housing market. But the housing market has become dependent on unearned, newly printed money, and stopping the flow might cause a catastrophic correction. If it doesn’t stop, however, inflation will explode. 

Let me walk you through some of the math.

Inflation closes the gap between money earned and money spent. Since the financial crisis of 2008, the Federal Reserve expanded M2 money supply from just under $8 trillion to around $22 trillion today. During that time GDP has increased from around $14.6 trillion to around $24.5 trillion today. We’ve gone from a ratio of one dollar chasing $2.20 in goods in services to an almost 1 to 1 ratio today. Inflation during the same period, according to the government, has eroded the dollar by a mere 33 percent. 

You think 8 percent inflation is high? Prices need to double to restore any semblance of balance between currency and the things you can buy with currency. We have a long way to go.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/05/25/the-real-reason-why-the-disinformation-governance-board-got-cancelled-ii-tipp-poll/

Why did the Joe Biden administration abruptly shut down its Disinformation Governance Board a mere three weeks after creating it? The latest I&I/TIPP Poll has the answer.

As the administration’s plan for creating the Orwellian-sounding speech regulator was being rolled out, the I&I/TIPP Poll asked 1,320 Americans from May 4 to May 6 a simple question: “How much do you trust the Disinformation Governance Board to decide what is disinformation fairly and accurately?”

Among the 550 who said they were following the Disinformation Board “closely,” the reaction was strong: 55% said they had “little trust” (22%) or “no trust at all” (32%). That compares with 42% who said they had “a lot of trust” (19%) and “quite a bit of trust” (22%).

In short, it was a highly unpopular idea. Indeed, it was more unpopular than even the overall numbers suggest.

The only major political grouping that trusted the Disinformation board was the Democratic Party. They gave it a big thumbs up in the poll, with 73% giving it “a lot” or “quite a bit” of trust, versus just 23% granting the new agency “little” or “no” trust.

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

“What the Durham trial has exposed is not getting the press it and the people deserve. The decision by the Clinton campaign to deliberately instigate a false story of Russian collusion by Donald Trump – no matter what one thought of him – was the dirtiest trick ever played in Presidential politics. It tells us what sort of a President Mrs. Clinton would have been. Why is this not getting more coverage? Can you imagine the headlines if roles were reversed?”

Self-doubt is usually considered a negative. And when it dominates one’s activities it is. In Measure for Measure, William Shakespeare has Lucio speak to Isabella: “Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we might win, by fearing to attempt.” A recent article in National Review, signed by 59 conservatives, was titled “America’s Crisis of Self-Doubt:” “Our traditional values of fair play, free speech and religious liberty are trampled by inflamed ideologies determined to impose their will by force and fear.” That is all true, but the real problem is the over-confidence of the woke who, with religious zeal, see society “as archaic, unfair, and racially biased.” As a governor of impetuous behavior, self-doubt is a positive.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-5-23-a-new-chink-in-the-armor-of-the-progressive-administrative-state

The great mission of the early twentieth century Progressives was to transform our constitutional order without ever amending the Constitution itself. The intellectual leader of the movement was Woodrow Wilson. The fundamental idea was to replace the messy and contentious system of separated powers and slow bi-cameral lawmaking with a cadre of supposedly apolitical administrative “experts” who could run the country smoothly and efficiently.

The idea sounded rather benign to most people at the time, and probably still sounds benign to most people today. Who could be against having “experts” to run significant government agencies? But a hundred-plus years into this project, we have seen cancerous growth of vast administrative bureaucracies, outside the constitutional structure, and exercising great powers, but accountable to no one but themselves — the very antithesis of the constitutional structure that our founders attempted to bequeath to us.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/dennis-prager/2022/05/24/joe-bidens-buffalo-speech-was-the-speech-of-an-indecent-man-n1600295

Biden used the terrible mass shooting of black people in a Buffalo grocery store to smear America, divide Americans and foment race-based hatred. A decent man would have given an entirely different speech.

A decent man would have gone to Buffalo and said something like this:

“My fellow Americans, what happened here in Buffalo was pure evil. Let there be no equivocating about this moral fact. If evil exists, what happened here was evil. But, my fellow Americans, this young man and his race-based homicidal hatred represents an infinitesimally small number of Americans, white or otherwise. The overwhelming majority of Americans of every race, ethnicity, and religion get along with each other beautifully. We work alongside each other, date each other, socialize with one another and marry one another. We are the most successful experiment in creating a multiracial, multi-ethnic, multi-religious country in world history. The actions of a deranged teenager do not change this fact.”

Instead, the hater-in-chief went to Buffalo and said:

“What happened here is simple and straightforward: terrorism. Terrorism. Domestic terrorism. Violence inflicted in the service of hate and the vicious thirst for power that defines one group of people being inherently inferior to any other group. A hate that, through the media and politics, the internet, has radicalized angry, alienated and lost individuals into falsely believing that they will be replaced. That’s the word. Replaced by ‘the other.’ By people who don’t look like them.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/23/another-january-6-lie-no-recon-tours-on-january-5/

In the aftermath of the four-hour disturbance at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, Democrats scrambled to prepare articles of impeachment against departing President Donald Trump for the second time. Trump—according to Democrats, the news media, and most of the GOP political establishment—had incited the violence with claims of a stolen election, and by encouraging his supporters to march to Capitol Hill following his speech near the White House that afternoon.

But it wasn’t enough to just denounce Trump. After all, he would be leaving Washington on January 20 to build his post-presidency political machine. So House Democrats upped the blame and shame game by accusing their Republican colleagues of organizing tours of the Capitol complex on January 5 so the alleged coup-plotters could map out the next day’s “insurrection.”

Representative Mikie Sherrill (D-N.J.) started the rumor a week after the protest. In a letter to members of the Capitol Police board, the agency responsible for securing the Capitol, Sherrill demanded an “immediate investigation into the suspicious behavior and access given to visitors to the Capitol Complex on Tuesday, January 5, 2021.” Sherrill claimed her training in the military gave her the keen ability to “recognize suspicious activity” and questioned why so many large outside groups were in and around the building that day.

Nearly three-dozen House Democrats co-signed her letter.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/05/house_passes_domestic_terrorism_prevention_act_targeting_americans_thought_speech.html

The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed a new bill that would greatly enhance the federal government’s ability to spy on Americans in an alleged effort to combat “domestic” terrorism.

H.R. 350, or the “Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act,” passed by a margin of 222-203. The vote was almost entirely along party lines, with every single House Democrat and a lone House Republican– the reprehensible RINO Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois– voting to approve the measure.

The proposal would reportedly create “domestic terrorism offices” within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Department of Justice (DOJ), and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), according to The Hill. The offices would be tasked with “monitoring and scrutinizing potential terror activity,” with a heavy emphasis on terror activity deemed motivated by “white supremacist” or “neo-Nazi” sentiments.

Democrats have predictably framed the bill as a necessary response to the mass shooting perpetrated by an avowed white supremacist at a Buffalo, New York, grocery store last week. The perpetrator, however, characterized himself online as being in the “mild-moderate-authoritarian Left category.”

Many Republicans have slammed the bill as a frightening example of government overreach. Texas Republican Rep. Chip Roy, for example, said the bill constitutes the “empowerment of the federal bureaucracy to target Americans.” He added, “This is nothing more than empowering the federal government to police thought and speech in the United States of America, and we should oppose it roundly.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/05/24/republicans-for-biden-owe-the-nation-heck-the-world-an-apology/

In the run-up to the 2020 election, the Biden campaign was gleeful about the flood of prominent Republicans who’d crossed the aisle to support Joe’s candidacy. These Never-Trumpers weren’t just expressing their disdain for President Donald Trump, they were heartily, lovingly, making the case for Joe Biden.

Back then, they were lauded as heroes by the establishment. Today, everyone knows the truth.

These Biden-supporting Republicans were utterly, embarrassingly, dangerously wrong about the man they were touting for president. And we are all now paying an enormous and rapidly increasing price for their arrogant stupidity.

Nothing better encapsulates the “Republicans for Biden” mindset than the statement issued by nearly 500 former national security officials in the fall of 2020 backing Biden.

Forget about the fact that they trafficked in anti-Trump lies such as the “Russian bounty” story and sided against Trump on China, climate change, and other issues of importance to conservatives.

What stands out today is when they claimed that Biden “is the leader our nation needs.”

“It is unthinkable,” these “experts” said in their statement, “that [Biden] would ever utter the phrase ‘I don’t take responsibility at all.’”

Would anyone make such a claim today?

Do a Google search of “Biden blames” and you’ll be flooded with examples of his refusing to take responsibility for anything.

https://glennloury.substack.com/p/unravelling-the-spiral-of-silence?s=r

Recently, I appeared on the podcast of Lex Fridman, a computer scientist who has worked on AI at places like MIT and Google. He’s a virtuosic interviewer who seems to be interested in pretty much everything. Go check out his YouTube channel, and you’ll likely be impressed by his range of guests and his ability to engage them in deep conversations about their lives and areas of expertise.

I made the trip out to Lex’s studio in Austin, Texas, and it was well worth the journey. Our conversation ranged from my own personal experiences to economics to race and politics to the really big questions, like death and the meaning of life. We talked for four hours, and he posted almost the entire thing. I must say, I think it’s one of the best recorded conversations I’ve ever engaged in.

The excerpt below is taken from that conversation, and in it Lex asks me about the effectiveness of accusations of racism. We see this everywhere. A professor or politician or some other public figure is accused of racism, and before the charges can even be investigated, poof. Their career goes up in smoke, whether or not they’ve actually done anything worthy of censure. Often it turns out they’re guilty of little more than choosing their words carelessly, and just as often they’re guilty, at least in my view, of nothing at all. This state of affairs is untenable, and I have no problem saying so. Others feel the way I do, and you’re now seeing more of them speak out against specious accusations of racism.

But there are still many, many people who recognize the terrible injustice of these accusations but fear the repercussions of defending the accused. It’s understandable. They don’t want the mob to direct its ire at them, and they may be in a position where they have much to lose and little to gain by speaking out. I worry that this widespread suppression could create conditions ripe for exploitation by some canny demagogue who could harness the resentments of a stifled electorate and, in the process, unleash something very ugly on this country. The political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann theorized the mechanisms that could bring this state of affairs about. She called it “the spiral of silence,” which I explain below.

We know the costs of remaining silent in the face of injustice. When that silence is broken, as it inevitably will be broken, are we prepared for what else may break along with it?