RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/04/28/bidenomics-recession-return-to-70s-style-stagflation-or-both/

Americans expecting a better economy to emerge three years after the COVID shutdowns will no doubt be disappointed by the first quarter’s GDP gain of just 1.1% with higher inflation. And it’s even worse than it looks.

Of course, President Joe Biden denied the worsening news, saying, “Today, we learned that the American economy remains strong, as it transitions to steady and stable growth.”

“Strong”? Really? No one believes that. As recently as late March, economists were looking for a first-quarter GDP growth number exceeding 3%. Instead, they got 1.1%, down from 2.6% in the fourth quarter and 3.2% in last year’s third quarter.

See the trend?

It’s no accident. The Fed, responding to 9%-plus inflation during the COVID “emergency,” has jacked up interest rates to 5% from near zero, and is expected to add another quarter point in early May during its meeting.

More ominously, a big part of the Q1 GDP slowdown came from businesses reducing their inventories and, for the fourth quarter in a row, their capital investments. Typically, businesses do that only when they expect really rough times ahead.

https://victorhanson.com/civilizational-killers-part-two-debt-and-inflation/

Debt and its twin inflation destroy civilizations. Ancient coins were sometimes called “redheads” as the raised impressed silhouettes of grandees stamped on “silver” coins were the first to have their silver veneers worn away revealing the “red” bronze beneath.

Our paper money is similarly becoming less and less valuable, the more we print of it. Currently, the U.S. owes 130 percent of its gross domestic product, in total about $33 trillion.

The staggering sum has not stopped annual federal borrowing, which may hit $2 trillion this year. The massive borrowing is unsustainable. Yet anyone who tries to cut the massive indebtedness will be smeared as cruel and insensitive.

America apparently shrugs that when the nation faces insolvency, we will deal with the catastrophe the way it is done in the Third World and in antiquity.

One, the state can always pay off its debts by printing endless money and inflating the economy. Germany did that by intent to pay off war reparations to the victorious allies by printing Reichsmarks to the point that they became utterly worthless.

https://victorhanson.com/civilizational-killers-part-one-perversion-of-the-law/

No civilization can continue if its bedrock values and institutions are eroding—especially if the effort to save them is considered worse than their destruction.

When we look to the civilizational decline of the Greek polis, the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, or of Europe in the 1930s we learn that erosion is a result of internal choices, and usually a matter of failing to adhere to time-honored customs and traditions, while evolving to meet new threats.

In the case of the autonomous Greek polis, the culprit was the inability of some 1,500 city-states to create a workable federal system for the common defense of Hellas—when threatened by Philip and Alexander. The Roman Empire was not able to maintain a common culture among its 70 million varied residents, nor to increase productivity to pay for always greater entitlements, or to systematize imperial succession, or inculcate Romanity among an increasingly diverse population.

For the Byzantines, it is hard to criticize an empire that sustained 1,100 years of continuous civilization. But in the fifteenth century, it failed to evolve into a partnership with a dynamic Western Christendom, especially after the damage suffered during the Fourth Crusade, to create a common front against Ottoman Islamism. Nor was a shrinking Constantinople able to attract Europeans into the empire, much less to convert Anatolians into Orthodox Christians.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/trans-marathoner-defeats-14000-women-in-race-after-competing-as-man-months-earlier/?

A transgender runner on Sunday defeated thousands of women in the female category of the London Marathon after competing as a man in the New York City race just months prior.

Glenique Frank, a 52-year old male athlete who now identifies as female, finished in 6160th place out of 20,123 entrants, outpacing 14,000 women.

“Girl power!,” Frank said to a reporter after the London event, flexing his biceps and abdomen muscles for the camera. Frank listed all the other races he’s participated in recently. For all of those, he was referred to as “Glen” rather than “Glenique.”

“My beautiful son stood there” on the sidelines to support, Frank said. “He’s having a baby, so I’m going to be a granny.”

Frank then ran off from the camera, wearing a transgender flag as a cape. The spectacle soon received intense backlash from some female professional runners.

“Males in the F category is UNFAIR for females,” Olympic marathoner Mara Yamauchi tweeted in response to the viral video of Frank.

Yamauchi suggested that Frank’s category switch enabled him to transcend his previously mediocre status. Last November, for example, he ran the NYC Marathon in the men’s category and finished 14,096th out of 26,539, according to Yamauchi.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/04/26/dominion-vs-russian-collusion-and-disinformation/

Fox News is reeling, both financially and with respect to its talent, after being drawn into a long lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems. 

The network just settled for an astounding $757.5 million and soon after released Tucker Carlson, the network’s highest-rated host.

The voting machine company had alleged some of Fox’s hosts had either promulgated, or allowed their guests to push, a false narrative that the corporation’s voting machines were “fixed” and misreported the vote count in some precincts of the 2020 presidential election.

In other words, Dominion walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars on the accusation that some raving guests and a few Fox journalists insinuated, falsely, that the machines had thrown the election to Joe Biden.

Yet no one argues that such post facto accusations influenced the election. The postelection dispute instead was over whether a news organization was responsible for all that its hundreds of guests and hosts say that proved later to be not substantiated, false, or defamatory.

Fox settled with Dominion reportedly to avoid messy revelations of its internal texts and to stop the hemorrhaging of its brand.

But by doing so, the network may have inadvertently set a dubious standard that any speculative opinion, voiced in public media, however nutty and later proven to be inaccurate, will be actionable.

If that is the standard, we are going to see a lot more costly lawsuits.

Compare Dominion’s writ with the twin “Russian collusion” and “Russian disinformation” hoaxes.

Lots of journalists and guests on network news, cable, public broadcasting, and internet news sites ran daily with the utter lie that the concocted Christopher Steele dossier was accurate.

Four years later, they were still claiming that Donald Trump had won the 2016 election only by enlisting the aid of the Russians—as an “asset” and puppet of Vladimir Putin.

All that was demonstrably untrue.

No one on these news shows ever produced any information validating the dossier, much less offered apologies to those whose lives they ruined, as in the case of Lt. General Michael Flynn and Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page.

The steady two-year drumbeat of media and DNC-fabricated untruths neutered the first two years of the Trump Administration.

Robert Mueller’s $40 million, 22-month special counsel “investigation” leaked wild and lurid rumors of Trump indictments to come, and yet ultimately found no proof of collusion.

No matter. The agendas of the Democratic Party’s collaboration with the media were fulfilled. The Trump Administration was wounded, forced on defense to reply to countless new fabrications, and smeared to the point of caricature.