RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/want-know-where-us-inflation-110000417.html

The Federal Reserve’s attempt to get a clean read on post-pandemic inflation has focused attention on gauges that elevate housing costs, which is why what happens to rental inflation will factor heavily into the future of monetary policy.

The good news is rental inflation may be close to topping out after advancing almost 6% in the 12 months through July. The bad news is it will take a while to settle back down to anything resembling pre-coronavirus norms.

And that means Fed officials will maintain high interest rates for some time.

“If you’re the Fed and you’re trying to push down on inflation, you have to sort of hammer the labor market a little bit, in the sense that that’s what is going to help push shelter inflation down,” said Omair Sharif, president of Inflation Insights in Pasadena, California. Most other prices, meanwhile, are “out of their control,” he said.

A monthly Labor Department report on consumer prices due out Tuesday is expected to show so-called core inflation, a widely tracked measure that excludes volatile food and energy prices, rose by another 0.3% in August after a similar increase in July.

While that would mark a slowdown versus the past year, it would still be elevated compared with the years before the pandemic. Nor is it likely to sway the Fed from delivering a third straight 75 basis-point rate hike when it meets Sept. 20-21.

“I expect to see sizable increases in this component of inflation for a while as the recent rise in new rentals makes its way into aggregate price measures,” Fed Governor Chris Waller said on Friday. “Sometime early next year, though, I expect to see the upward pressure on inflation from these forces to ease.”

Outsize Share

Rents have always been important in measures of inflation, due to their outsize share in most household budgets: They comprise a little over 30% of the headline consumer price index, and about 40% of the core index.

But during the pandemic, as inflation has surged, other, smaller components — like used vehicles — recorded such unprecedented price increases that they, too, have become major drivers of those measures.

So, in an attempt to get a better handle on underlying inflation, policy makers have increasingly turned to such measures as “trimmed-mean” and “median” indexes to get a sense of how “broad-based” inflationary pressures really are.

https://www.city-journal.org/nature-human-behavior-editorial-is-anti-science

Nature Human Behavior, one of the most prestigious journals for social science research, recently published an editorial titled “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans.” Though short, the article generated tremendous pushback among academics and intellectuals concerned about the spread of social-justice ideology into science. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker said the journal was “no longer a peer-reviewed scientific journal but an enforcer of a political creed,” while Greg Lukianoff, the CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, described the journal’s statement as “an epistemic catastrophe.” What did the editorial say?

In short, it took the position that scientific truth should defer to politics. The journal now considers it appropriate to suppress research that “undermines—or could reasonably be perceived to undermine—the rights and dignities” of people or groups, as well as “text or images that disparage a person or group on the basis of socially constructed human groupings.” Researchers are urged to “consider the potential implications of research on human groups defined on the basis of social characteristics” and “to contextualise their findings to minimize as much as possible potential misuse or risks of harm to the studied groups in the public sphere.” Anything that could be perceived as disparaging is now fair game for rejection or retraction.

The implications on scientific inquiry and truth-seeking are clear. As the journalist Jesse Singal observed, an empirically flawless study could be retracted under the guise of social justice. “What’s most alarming is that unless I’m missing something, research that is perfectly valid and well-executed could run afoul of these guidelines,” he wrote.

But such behavior already occurs. Sometimes, studies that offend social-justice orthodoxy are assigned a “flaw” of some kind—usually one that would be treated as minor had the results been different—and rejected on that pretextual basis. The psychologist Lee Jussim has coined the term rigorus mortus selectivus to describe the widespread practice among social scientists to denounce research one dislikes using criteria that are ostensibly scientific but never applied to politically congenial research. Other times, studies that manage to penetrate the literature (despite the best attempts of ideological gatekeepers) are seized upon by observers who scrutinize every aspect of the research using unreasonable criteria. Because no study is perfect, it is always possible to find some limitation to justify a cancellation campaign.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/09/10/the-fall-of-los-angeles/

For much of the 20th century, Los Angeles symbolised the future. Over the course of the century, the population grew 40-fold to nearly four million people.

But now, for the first time in its history, the population of Los Angeles is in decline, falling by 204,000 between July 2020 and July 2021. LA was once a magnet for investors. But recently many of the area’s corporate linchpins – including aerospace giant Northrop Grumman, Occidental Petroleum and Hilton Hotels – have left, taking with them high-paying jobs and philanthropic resources.

Worse still, conditions in LA today are bordering on the medieval. Anyone visiting some of the most famous districts of urban Los Angeles – notably downtown, Hollywood and Venice Beach – sees clear signs of destitution, including sprawling homeless encampments, vast numbers of people living in vehicles and rampant crime. Last year, a UN official compared conditions on LA’s Skid Row, a poor downtown neighbourhood, to those of Syrian refugee camps. Smash-and-grab thefts at local 7-Elevens and the persistent theft of goods from railyards suggest this is a city that has lost control to the modern version of lawless highwaymen.

So-called progressives have long dreamed of transforming the famously sprawled Los Angeles into a dense, transit-oriented, sun-kissed version of New York. But despite massive corporate and government investment, attempts to do this have failed. Rather than a vibrant hipster paradise, LA’s urban core is dominated by the homeless, the poor, government workers and a few creative types – making for an odd juxtaposition of homeless camps and low-rent hotels alongside high-end restaurants and artists’ lofts. Meanwhile, newly built luxury apartments have suffered vacancy rates as high as 14 per cent – remarkable in a city so short of housing.

Unsurprisingly, some Angelenos have sought to reverse this disastrous course. Earlier this year, disgruntled residents united around property developer Rick Caruso in his insurgent campaign to become mayor of Los Angeles. Caruso spent over $24million of his own money on the first round of the election in June.

Caruso is the grandson of Italian immigrants, whose father founded the successful LA business, Dollar Rent a Car. And he has himself been a big player in California for years. His real-estate business, founded in 1987, is now worth more than $4 billion. Caruso has built shopping centres all over the metropolitan area, from the iconic Farmer’s Market and middle-class San Fernando Valley to the swanky Pacific Palisades. Yet Caruso’s mayoral bid appears to have stalled against the well-organised might of the city’s public-employee-driven political machine.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/11/america-delira/

Travel abroad and or talk to pro-American foreigners here, and you will be surprised at what they say. It is not boilerplate anti-Americanism of the usual cheap Euro style. And their keen criticism is not just that we are $30 trillion in debt, dependent on China, with a corrupt elite, or have gone insane inventing the most lurid crimes to put away the supposedly predetermined guilty Donald Trump.

Instead, they express disbelief, worry, lamentation even, that the one solid referent in the world has gone, well, completely rabid. They are terrified after the Afghanistan debacle that their old ally or new homeland, the once constant America, is delirious, incompetent, and self-loathing, and now there is no plausible alternative to the old American deterrence. 

So, they wonder who will resist China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea—and are silently petrified to go it alone without the United States.

They seem staggered by the very ideas that now emanate from the United States: that nonexistent borders are desirable; that once rarified institutions like the FBI or CIA now function like the Stasi of old; that the very idea of meritocracy is considered racist; that one incorrect word can destroy a life-long career; that there are three or more sexes, not two; that biological men with male genitalia and physiology can compete, and destroy decades of advances, in women’s sports; that race is the sole mode of self-identification; and that half of America dislikes American customs, history—and the other 50 percent of the population—as much as do its enemies.

Onlookers no longer see American universities as free-wheeling bastions of unfettered research and expression. Rather they watch dreary (and sometimes scary) places where conformity to the old Soviet-style is enforced—or else. 

There is an apprehension that Russian hypersonic missiles are superior to America’s, that China could easily sink the Pacific fleet if it got too close to a blockade of Taiwan, that America is now reconciled to a nuclear Iranian theocracy, that North Korea will try something stupid soon—and that the American military is now somehow different, somehow less lethal. 

Dogma and Stalinist-like orthodoxy now plague our films, our fiction, our research, and even our scientific inquiry. Public policy discussion of real problems like long COVID can be as much about what race is affected the worst by it—and thus which diabolical actor or demographic is to blame—rather than a Marshall Plan rush to find a cure for everyone. 

A discussion of Homer’s Odyssey in college is likely to be a Sovietized melodrama of rooting out the sexists and racists in the preliterate bard’s cosmos, rather than why and how such an epic has enthralled audiences for over 2,700 years. The subtext is that we are growing poorer, weaker, and more ridiculous—an acceptable price if we can at least prove we are woke.

So, what made America unhinged? 

The Woke Plague

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/09/the_fbis_apex_bureaucracy_is_dangerous.html

“The DOJ-FBI monstrosity that now exists is another powerful example of how a nation’s culture ultimately determines a nation’s fate.  Because so much business of the State today occurs in secret and beyond citizens’ oversight, it has never been more important for ordinary citizens and their government to share a common culture keeping their interests aligned.  When the bureaucracy does not share the people’s beliefs, then it persistently acts contrary to their wishes.  It replaces Americans’ wants and needs with its own.  And like any apex beast, it becomes a danger to those who dare threaten its control.”

There is growing hand-wringing among the devil’s den in D.C. that the American people’s cratering confidence in the Department of Injustice and Fascist Bureau of Investigation will lead to absolute anarchy in the streets.  Considering both institutions have been vocal cheerleaders for Black Lives Matter and Antifa domestic terrorists and that Democrats’ war on police and support for open borders have succeeded in producing skyrocketing crime rates throughout the country without any pushback from Merrick Garland or Chris Wray, their mercurial concern for the rule of law seems grounded in nothing more than risible self-interest.  They don’t trust us!  Worse, they don’t fear us!  What if they learn not to obey?

Here’s a truth that tens of millions of Americans understand: if the sweeping criminal enforcement arm of the federal Leviathan disappeared tomorrow, life for the vast majority of citizens would go unchanged.  It might even improve.  We are spoon-fed this Big Government fallacy from kindergarten on up that absolute chaos lurks behind every corner if not for the protections provided from our beneficent bureaucratic masters who maintain order and peace.  That’s absurd propaganda meant to keep Americans conditioned into accepting total government control.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/federal-bureau-investigated/

On August 8, for the first time in U.S. history, the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided the residence of a former president, Donald J. Trump. That home invasion invites another first for America: a sudden and thorough search of FBI headquarters, with bureau bosses and their lawyers barred from the premises and from contact with anyone inside.

Under these conditions, a crack team of independent investigators, deploying the latest forensic and high-tech tools, could be turned loose on all FBI files and records. The first thing this team might uncover is recent FBI action in a high-profile whistleblower case. Back on February 21, 2020, Philip Haney, author of  See Something Say Nothing: A Homeland Security Officer Exposes the Government’s Submission to Jihad was “found deceased” in Amador County, California, killed by a gunshot to the chest. Despite rumors, Haney’s death was not a suicide.

The Amador sheriff, “reached out to the Federal Bureau of Investigation to assist in analyzing documents, phone records, numerous thumb drives and a lap top that were recovered from the scene and Mr. Haney’s RV. Those items and numerous other pieces of evidence, were turned over to the FBI. The FBI has performed a forensic examination of these items. We expect to receive these reports within the next few weeks.” More than two years later, there is no news on Haney’s thumb drives, documents and laptop in FBI custody.

With the evasive Christopher Wray removed from the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building, independent investigators could retrieve this material and possibly develop leads in the Haney homicide case. Somebody had motive, means, and opportunity. As Rod Steiger said in In the Heat of the Night, “we have the body, which is dead.” If investigators establish that the FBI destroyed or altered evidence, that would make for an obstruction of justice case against those responsible, and any FBI bosses who signed off on it.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/09/12/were-better-off-under-biden-who-is-obama-kidding/

When he wasn’t admiring his White House portrait, Barack Obama managed to say a nice thing about President Joe Biden. He must have been joking, though, because what he said defies reality.

“Joe, it is now America’s good fortune to have you as president,” Obama said. “The country is better off than when you took office. We should all be deeply grateful for that.”

Our “good fortune”? Let’s review just how much “better off” we all are thanks to Biden and his fellow Democrats.

COVID deaths: When Biden took office on the promise that he had a plan that would end COVID, the official death count was 424,318. Today it is over 1.044 million. In other words, there have been nearly 620,000 COVID deaths on Biden’s watch. And that’s despite all the interventions Biden claimed would end the pandemic. Are the families of those 620,000 people better off?

Inflation: Despite the recent decline in pump prices, gasoline costs 91% more than it did on January 2021, according to the Consumer Price Index. Food prices are up 14%. Overall prices have climbed 13% in the time Biden has been president. To put that last number in perspective, the overall increase in the CPI during President Donald Trump’s entire four years in office was just 7%.

Real earnings: How about workers, are they better off? While wages have climbed, they haven’t nearly kept pace with Bidenflation. As a result, workers have seen their real wages decline by 5%, which works out to an effective average pay cut of $2,726 a year. Does that, in Obama’s mind, make them better off?