RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://asiatimes.com/2021/11/us-inflation-more-horrible-than-washington-admits/

The US Consumer Inflation Report for October was horrible, showing a 12% annualized rate of price change. But it’s even worse than it looks. The shelter component of the index lags the more reliable private gauges of rent inflation. That means worse is to come.

Three US companies publish national rent indexes – CoreLogic, Zillow and Apartmentlist.com – and their readings of year-on-year rent inflation range from 9% to 16%. But the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports a year-on-year rise in the rents of just 3.4%. Shelter represents a third of household expenditures according to the Consumer Price Index.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the private indices and the government measure of rent inflation moved in lockstep, albeit with lags in the latter reflecting the fact that not everyone’s lease expired at the same time. Given past lags, the rent increases should have shown up in CPI by now. So I really can’t explain the discrepancy.

Led by used vehicle prices, durable goods prices rose 12% over the twelve months through October, according to the official data. That can be blamed on the chip shortage, which constrained auto production and left consumers and car dealers in bidding wars for everything on four wheels. But the price of nondurable goods also jumped 10% over the past year. That’s simple demand-pull inflation: the combination of a $6 trillion giveaway to US consumers and enhanced jobless benefits that kept 2 million Americans out of the workforce left too much money to chase too few goods.

https://www.bloombergquint.com/business/ships-keep-coming-pushing-u-s-port-logjam-and-waits-to-records

The logjam of container ships outside the California ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach swelled to another record as stepped-up efforts to clear cargo off the docks failed to prevent the average wait for vessels from reaching nearly 17 days. The queue, both at anchor and in a holding zone, rose to 83 ships as of late Friday, four more than Wednesday and topping the previous high of 81 set earlier in the week, according to officials who monitor marine traffic in San Pedro Bay. The average wait increased to 16.9 days, double the level from two months ago, according to L.A.’s Wabtec Port Optimizer.

Strained supply chains have become an economic drag on the world’s largest economy and a political risk for President Joe Biden as the disruptions put upward pressure on inflation while highlighting shortages of workers, including truck drivers and warehouse staff. Consumer sentiment is deteriorating amid a spike in the cost of living.

“Every sector of the supply chain has reached capacity,” Port of Long Beach Executive Director Mario Cordero said in a statement this week announcing that its terminals had their second-busiest October on record.
“We are trying to add capacity by searching for vacant land to store containers, expanding the hours of operation at terminals, and implementing a fee that will incentivize ocean carriers to pull their containers out of the port as soon as possible.”

The White House earlier this week touted incremental progress at L.A.-Long Beach– a 20% decline in the number of containers sitting for more than nine days days in the week to Nov. 8. The adjoining gateways for 40% of the nation’s containerized imports have handled 17% more volume this year, while their land-side storage capacity remained unchanged.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-11-12-do-you-have-any-doubt-that-the-fbi-is-fundamentally-a-criminal-organization

Over the years, mostly in connection with the Trump/Russia collusion hoax, I have had many occasions to cover what I have considered to be wrongful — indeed clearly criminal — conduct by the FBI. To give just a few examples, there was the 2016 application for a FISA warrant against Carter Page (three times renewed) based on knowingly false information; the 2017 set-up of Michael Flynn; and then-Director Comey’s blatant lies to President Trump in early 2017 about what the FBI was up to. Or go to this link for a long litany of wrongful FBI and DOJ conduct.

The problem with all of this, of course, is that the FBI completely undermines its own mission when it engages in such conduct. As I wrote at that last link in December 2017:

[Y]ou would be out of your mind ever to cooperate in any way with these guys. And so would everybody else in this country. And thus, the FBI and Justice are totally undermining their own effectiveness as law enforcement institutions.

So with all that has now come out about the FBI’s sordid and criminal role in the Trump/Russia matter, do you think that the people at the Bureau would be at least a little chastened? Don’t be ridiculous. Indeed, they have every reason to have learned the opposite lesson. With more than five years having passed since the launch of the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation (i.e., spying on the Trump presidential campaign), most statutes of limitations have expired without any of the main perpetrators getting charged. The sole FBI guy who has taken a plea (lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, for altering an email submitted as part of one of the later FISA applications) was sentenced in January 2021 to mere probation (that is, no jail time). The New York Times quotes the sentencing judge, James Boasberg, as follows:

“Anybody who has watched what Mr. Clinesmith has suffered is not someone who will readily act in that fashion,” Judge Boasberg said. “Weighing all of these factors together — both in terms of the damages he caused and what he has suffered and the positives in his own life — I believe a probationary sentence is appropriate here and will therefore impose it.”

https://www.city-journal.org/ivy-love-getty-wedding-and-the-california-machine

While San Francisco public school students have been instructed to wear masks between bites at lunch, Ivy Love Getty, heiress to the Getty Oil fortune, celebrated her nuptials last weekend in a flurry of sparsely masked gatherings with the San Francisco political machine, fading celebrities, and some stray European royalty. The ceremony, officiated by House speaker Nancy Pelosi, was held at City Hall. Vogue writes that “San Francisco’s City Hall is designed to inspire awe—a symbol of the city’s power and resilience . . . with its white marble detailing and soaring dome that looms more than 300 feet overhead,” but adds that the ceremony felt intimate and personal.

Do tell. City Hall is located in the Tenderloin neighborhood, ground zero of the city’s drug and homelessness crises. Ordinarily, the awe-inspiring symbol of rebirth is surrounded by syringes, excrement, and half-alive bodies. November 6, however, was no ordinary day. Police diverted traffic while red carpets covered the stairs. Vogue attests that the party proceeded as planned. No amount of human misery can ruin the matrimony of the local petroleum princess, certainly not the kind of misery that the political machine allows to persist right under its nose.

I’ve been waiting for two months to receive a new shower door for the bathroom I’ve been renovating, but the Gettys don’t have supply-chain problems. Ivy wore at least a half-dozen gowns during the various gatherings—Alexander McQueen, Emanuel Ungaro, John Galliano—and two pairs of Louboutins on her wedding day: one for the ceremony and another for the reception. The reception was held at the Getty mansion, which was adorned with, Vogue informs, “a museum-quality collection of European antiques, Venetian paintings, French textiles, and Russian chandeliers, . . . gold-framed Impressionist paintings,” and a rose garden. Honored by such guests as Gavin Newsom (his last public appearance before a mysterious sabbatical), Kamala Harris, Justin Bieber, and the princess of Greece, a girl has to do her best.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/12/the-cdc-cant-prove-a-single-instance-of-a-naturally-immune-individual-spreading-covid/

In response to a law firm’s query, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was unable to provide a single instance in which an unvaccinated person who’d previously had COVID-19 became reinfected with and transmitted the virus to someone else. The CDC said it does not collect such data, even though the medical freedom of millions of Americans hang in the balance.

A record 4.4 million Americans quit their jobs in September, many of them pushed out of the workforce by the unnecessary vaccine mandates.

Attorney Aaron Siri wrote on Substack that his firm Siri & Glimstad LLP obtained this information via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request on behalf of the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN), a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit founded by Del Bigtree dedicated to “investigating the safety of medical procedures, pharmaceutical drugs, and vaccines while educating the public of their right to ‘informed consent.’”

Siri found it incredible that the CDC was not collecting this information.

You would assume that if the CDC was going to crush the civil and individual rights of those with natural immunity by having them expelled from school, fired from their jobs, separated from the military, and worse, the CDC would have proof of at least one instance of an unvaccinated, naturally immune individual transmitting the COVID-19 virus to another individual. If you thought this, you would be wrong.

“The CDC’s incredible response is that it does not have a single document reflecting that this has ever occurred. Not one,” Siri wrote.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/12/the-royalist-left/

The Left lives in an upside-down world of its own creation. Yet in our pluralistic republic, it is entitled to its delusions. The problem is these delusions are not enough. Their misery demands company.

Whether their largely undereducated and overly indoctrinated masses know it, the Left crawled out of the anti-Enlightenment, reactionary ooze of French philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ideological cesspool. Stated simply, the Left’s goal is to rule as an enlightened vanguard under the direction of a “legislator” to impose a new civil religion and other diktats upon Americans and drag them back into an idealized state of nature composed of “noble savages” no longer constrained by the corrupting influences of civilization. It is why the Left’s use of a vehicle called the “Democratic Party” is so deeply, bitterly ironic. For the Left’s tactics and aims are anything but democratic. 

Of course, the Left’s tactics and aims don’t fit on a bumper sticker and, regardless, many leftists wouldn’t be caught dead in an internal combustion-propelled vehicle. Further, as recent election results in Virginia and New Jersey suggest, when the Left’s tactics and aims are imposed through public policy they prove ineffective and, to no rational person’s surprise, unpopular. But this is why the Left spends so much time and money crafting “narratives”—i.e., lies—to obfuscate their unpopularity. Sometimes they are successful, other times not; but the Left’s narratives and disinformation should be easily exposed when one remembers the upside-down nature of their delusions.

The Left are the modern royalists. They believe themselves among those of our fellow citizens who would benefit from an authoritarian regime and the status quo; and as such they are diametrically opposed to the core principles of the American Revolution—a populist uprising, if ever there was one.

Prior to the American Revolution, all sovereignty was vested in the king or queen; and the people were subjects of the crown, possessing only those rights allowed by the sovereign or the parliament (using the crown’s delegated sovereign power). To put it succinctly, the governing paradigm was the king or queen at the top and the people on the bottom.

After the American Revolution, all sovereignty was vested in the American people, individually and collectively. Each American’s individual rights were understood to be from God, not the government—the latter established to protect these inalienable rights and serve only through and with the consent of the citizenry, who were largely to be self-governing. The new, revolutionary paradigm inverted the pyramidal governing paradigm: now, the people were at the top and the government was on the bottom. This is the populist, principled foundation of American exceptionalism.

And the regressive, royalist Left cannot stand it.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/11/the_doj_and_fbi_have_combined_to_destroy_project_veritas.html

Project Veritas uses hidden camera techniques to expose corruption, dishonesty, anarchy, and totalitarian impulses in American institutions. Given the times in which we live, that means Project Veritas is usually exposing leftists and their organizations. It’s almost certainly not a coincidence, then, that the FBI engaged in a series of early-morning raids against Project Veritas employees and its founder, James O’Keefe, ostensibly because, a year ago, they possessed, but refused to use (and gave to law enforcement), a diary that we now know belonged to Joe Biden’s pathetic, drug-addicted daughter, Ashley.

It’s even less of a coincidence that the New York Times immediately knew about the raids and later published Project Veritas’s confidential correspondence with its attorneys. What we’re witnessing is a political hit job that would be completely at home in any penny-ante, third-world, tin pot tyranny—in other words, welcome to Biden’s America.

The story starts with Ashley Biden, a Biden child almost as pathetic as Hunter. Like her brother, she has had drug problems, including an arrest for marijuana possession (although, big surprise, the charges were dropped) and a video purportedly showing her using cocaine at a party.

Over a year ago, the louche Ashley ended up in a drug rehabilitation center and reported that her diary was stolen while she was there. Tipsters approached Project Veritas, claiming to have a copy of the diary which, they said, Ashley had abandoned or forgotten when she left the clinic. Unable to determine whether the diary was even real, Project Veritas tried to give it to Ashley’s attorney, who refused it. Project Veritas then gave it to law enforcement. It never published the diary.

Eventually, the National File released the document. It made a bit of a splash because the diary refers to Ashley’s belief that she was sexually abused as a child, talks about inappropriate showers with Daddy Joe, and discusses drug abuse, marital affairs, and more. It’s the pathetic document of a damaged person raised by a sleazy parent.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/11/the_5th_circuits_brilliant_opinion_staying_oshas_vaccine_mandate.html

Despite (or perhaps because of) a long career spent reading judicial decisions, I really hate reading cases. A stellar exception arose on Friday, when the Fifth Circuit issued its decision in BST Holdings, L.L.C. et al. v. OSHA, reaffirming the initial stay it granted when multiple entities and individuals challenged OSHA’s recently issued vaccine mandate. In one brutal paragraph after another, the Court rips apart the mandate, citing law, facts, OSHA precedent, and even a Ron Klain tweet. It’s a tour de force that makes it unlikely that any halfway honest court can or would resuscitate the mandate or that either OSHA or even Congress could try again.

There are a few dates you should know: In June 2020, when fear about COVID was at a peak, OSHA “reasonably determined” that an emergency temporary standard (“ETS”) was unnecessary. Over a year later, on September 9, 2021, Biden announced that he was going to impose a national vaccine mandate. That same day, Ron Klain retweeted a Stephanie Ruhle tweet stating that the vaccine “is the ultimate work-around for the Federal govt to require vaccinations.” Finally, almost two months later, on November 5, OSHA finally got around to promulgating the ETS.

And there are two facts you need to know: Congress created OSHA

[T]o assure Americans ‘safe and healthful working conditions and to preserve our human resources.’ … It was not—and likely could not be, under the Commerce Clause and nondelegation doctrine—intended to authorize a workplace safety administration in the deep recesses of the federal bureaucracy to make sweeping pronouncements on matters of public health affecting every member of society in the profoundest of ways. [p. 6, citations and footnote omitted.]

OSHA’s authority regarding issuing an ETS is also extremely narrow, requiring a grave danger from exposure to hazardous substances, toxic agents, or new hazards, all of which require urgent intervention. ETSs are “‘an ‘unusual response’ to ‘exceptional circumstances.’”  (p. 8, citations omitted.) The legal standard is that this “extraordinary power” must be “delicately exercised” and only in “limited situations.” (Ibid.)

https://thefederalist.com/2021/11/10/new-fdrlst-susquehanna-poll-shows-bidens-approval-sliding-to-36-percent-widespread-disapproval-of-critical-race-theory/

President Joe Biden’s approval ratings are nose-diving, according to a new poll from The Federalist and Susquehanna Polling & Research.

The poll, which surveyed 800 likely voters nationwide from Nov. 1 through Nov. 9 of 2021, shows Biden’s overall approval rating slipping to just 36 percent, with disapproval at 52 percent. Biden’s approval rating among registered Democrats is just 70 percent, according to the poll, with one in five registered Democrats saying they did not approve of the job Biden is doing as president. Among voters who are registered as independents, only 29 percent said they approved of Biden’s job as president, while 50 percent said they did not approve of Biden.

The poll from The Federalist and Susquehanna also found widespread dissatisfaction with Biden’s economic and immigration policies thus far. On immigration, only 23 percent of voters surveyed approved of Biden’s efforts to stop illegal immigration across the U.S.-Mexico border, while 51 percent said they disapproved of Biden’s policies on immigration.

Similarly, 34 percent of voters said they approved of how Biden has handled economic policies, while 51 percent said they did not approve of the job he has done on the economy. When asked who they thought was most responsible for skyrocketing gas prices, a plurality of voters — 46 percent — said they blamed Biden and congressional Democrats. Only 7 percent blamed Republicans, while 43 percent blamed other economic factors.

https://spectator.org/what-did-obama-know-and-when-did-he-know-it-2/

In researching my 2020 book, Unmasking Obama, I focused on one question above all others: What did Barack Obama know about the plot to link Donald Trump to Russia and when he did he know it? Unlike the Watergate era, when all the insiders in government and media rushed to discover what Nixon knew, only the outsiders have dared to ask about Obama.

Major credit here goes to Rep. Devin Nunes and his chief investigator Kash Patel, Inspector General Michael Horowitz, former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, and most recently Special Counsel John Durham. For all their good efforts, however, this probe remains very much a work in progress.

That caution established, the answer to the question in the headline is becoming increasingly clear. The information contained in Durham’s recent indictment of Russian national Igor Danchenko, when coupled with the CIA notes declassified in October 2020 by Ratcliffe, leads directly to the White House. In the past week, these revelations have gotten a fair share of attention, at least on the right side of the blogosphere. They deserve it.

What has not gotten attention, however, is the specious counter-narrative that Obama and his allies have been quietly constructing for the last five years. Deconstructing this counter-narrative may not put Obama’s Praetorian guard in prison, but it should provide Watergate-level amusement for those of us who believe prison is where Obama’s people belong.

The Rosetta Stone of the counter-narrative may well be a comprehensive article in the Washington Post from June 2017. Perhaps more than any other bit of Trump era “journalism,” this article — complete with photos and flow charts — revealed the major media’s eagerness to enable the ongoing Democrat-Deep State disinformation campaign. A July 2017 update — “The Post’s new findings in Russia’s bold campaign to influence the U.S. election” — contained even more bogus charts and timelines.