U.S. inflation sizzles as consumer prices post biggest annual gain since 1982 Lucia Mutikani

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/u-consumer-prices-increase-further-133924174.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall

U.S. consumer prices rose solidly in November as Americans paid more for food and a range goods, leading to the largest annual gain since 1982, posing a political nightmare for President Joe Biden’s administration and cementing expectations for the Federal Reserve to start raising interest rates next year.

The report from the Labor Department on Friday, which followed on the heels of a slew of data this month showing a rapidly tightening labor market, makes it likely the U.S. central bank will announce that it is speeding up the wind-down of its massive bond purchases at its policy meeting next week.

With supply bottlenecks showing little sign of easing and companies raising wages as they compete for scarce workers, high inflation could persist well into 2022. The increased cost of living, the result of shortages caused by the relentless COVID-19 pandemic, is hurting Biden’s approval rating. The White House and the Fed have characterized high inflation this year as transitory.

“There’s not much room to explain away this inflation from pandemic or reopening anomalies,” said Will Compernolle, a senior economist at FHN Financial in New York. “Inflation is a tax, gas and food are among the most regressive aspects of it. Lower-income Americans spend disproportionately on both.”

In the Race for ‘Climate Leadership,’ Everyone’s a Loser Rupert Darwall

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/in-the-race-for-climate-leadership-everyones-a-loser-opinion/ar-AARGkLg

Last year, Joe Biden campaigned on the promise that America would lead the world in the fight against climate change. At last month’s Glasgow climate conference, however, President Biden diluted candidate Biden’s bold promise to a plaintive “hopefully”—implying, he said, leadership by example. At home, his climate plan in the Build Back Better bill is stalled in the Senate, and his election pledge to legislate a net-zero enforcement mechanism by the end of his first term has gone nowhere.

Aspirations to climate leadership are faring little better in Europe. Germany’s new traffic-light political coalition—the red SPD, the yellow Free Democrats, and the Greens—is making the Paris climate agreement its top priority. In April, Germany’s constitutional court ruled that its 2050 net-zero target was so distant that it violated the freedoms of young people. So, along with Sweden, Germany became the first country to legislate a 2045 net-zero target. Yet the new German government’s net-zero plan, as outlined in the coalition agreement, may as well have been designed to worsen Europe’s current energy crisis and sink its largest and most successful economy.

Under the timetable inherited from the Merkel government, zero-emitting nuclear power—which only a decade ago accounted for one-fourth of German electricity generation—will be phased out by the end of next year. To make matters worse, the new coalition is bringing forward the closure of all Germany’s coal-fired power stations from 2038 to 2030 and at the same time raising the share of renewables to 80 percent. Notes energy expert Lucian Pugliaresi, Germany’s energy policy initiatives “will not be sufficient to meet demand for electricity in Germany in 2030.”

5 Biggest Takeaways From The Latest Review Of Wisconsin’s Rigged 2020 Election Wisconsin is a case study in the kind of ho-hum execution of elections that chips away at Americans’ confidence in our elections.By Kylee Zempel

https://thefederalist.com/2021/12/10/5-biggest-takeaways-from-the-latest-review-of-wisconsins-rigged-2020-election/

After a 10-month review of the 2020 election in the Dairy State, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty has compiled its findings — which set off alarm bells about the state’s massive election integrity shortcomings and reveal weaknesses the swing state must shore up before the next election.

The review, which WILL said it approached “without presumption as to what it would find,” included polling, surveys, an inspection of the law, interviews with elected officials, an analysis of almost 20,000 ballots and 29,000 absentee ballot envelopes, as well as a review of tens of thousands of documents obtained through more than 460 open records requests.

“It’s clear many Republicans, like Democrats before them, are convinced that there was a ‘Big Steal.’ And much of the legacy media is of the view that, since there is little or no evidence that Trump won the election, any effort to look into whether proper procedures were followed is just part of the baseless conspiracy-mongering that pushes ‘the Big Lie,’” WILL attorneys wrote in their review of the study’s findings. “But WILL’s review indicates the truth may lie between these two poles.”

While WILL’s work also showed some state election procedures and outcomes to be above bar — including no significant issues with voting machines and limited instances of ineligible people successfully voting — some findings were troubling. Here are the top takeaways.

1. Unlawful Votes Exceeded Biden’s Margin of Victory

Tens of thousands of Wisconsin votes cast in the 2020 election did not comply with state law, especially regarding ballot drop boxes and “indefinite confinement.”

As a recent audit by the state’s Legislative Audit Bureau showed, absentee ballot dropboxes were used prevalently at the behest of the Wisconsin Elections Commission in violation of state law. These dropboxes were connected to an extra 20,000 votes for now-President Joe Biden, with no noteworthy effect for then-President Donald Trump.

Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America Paperback – July 31, 2001 by John McWhorter

https://www.amazon.com/Losing-Race-Self-Sabotage-Black-America/dp/0060935936/?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=ztyym&pf_rd_p=

Why do so many African Americans—even comfortably middle-class ones—continue to see racism as a defining factor in their lives?

Columbia University linguistics professor John McWhorter, born at the dawn of the post-Civil Rights era, spent years trying to make sense of this question. In this book he dared to say the unsayable: racism’s ugliest legacy is the disease of defeatism that has infected Black America. Losing the Race explores the three main components of this cultural virus: the cults of victimology, separatism, and anti-intellectualism that are making Black people their own worst enemies in the struggle for success. With Losing the Race, a bold new voice rises among Black intellectuals.

Why does Pfizer want its vaccine research protected? By Matt Rowe

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/12/why_does_pfizer_want_its_vaccine_research_protected.html

Go look at the VAERS COVID Vaccine Mortality Report to know why Pfizer wants FDA protection for its vaccine research along with 75 years of document secrecy. While there are all sorts of ways to interpret the VAERS data, and it’s entirely possible that the vaccine is safer than COVID, not only have many people probably died from the vaccine but there’s also still no way of knowing what the vaccine’s long-term effects are.

Some experts have calculated that only about 1% of adverse reactions are ever reported for various reasons in the US. This could be due to very minor symptoms, unfelt symptoms, or the amount of time and bureaucracy a doctor must go through to make a report. Some reasonable conservative estimates are that deaths due to the COVID vaccine in the US are around 140,000. Keep in mind that this analysis does not distinguish the factor that deaths are much more highly likely to be reported in VAERS than more minor symptoms.

If you assume that 80% of deaths are reported (80/20 rule) and that VAERS reports 19,552 deaths, then the number of COVID deaths due to vaccines is much more likely around 24,440 between 2020/21. The number of adverse deaths per prior years was about 400, or something over 5,200 deaths during the previous 30 years. At first look, these numbers are startling.

Consider, however, that ~100,000,000 million Americans were vaccinated in 2020-21, and if there were 24,440 deaths, then the probability of near-term death from the vaccine is very low. The Adverse Reaction Fatality Rate (ARFR) is about .0002% (2 in 10,000).

This is much lower than the general COVID Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) of .013% (130 in 10,000). Using the VAERS reported 19,552 numbers, the probability is virtually the same as my number at .0002% of near-term death (2 in 10,000).

Chaos and the Threat to Democracy By Abraham H. Miller

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/12/chaos_and_the_threat_to_democracy_.html

Among politics’ strangest alliances are those between the elite and the mob. They don’t happen often. The few times they have occurred produced devastating effects. The most notable of them was the rise of the Nazi party, which recruited its original and most loyal adherents from the outcasts of society.

When the Nazis became mainstream, Hitler himself remarked how he missed the passionate street fighters of old who had been replaced by political opportunists and office seekers.

There is a method to this odd partnership. It is built on mobilizing the periphery, creating chaos, and enhancing chaos where it already exists.

The Nazi example finds its parallel much earlier in the coup of Louis Bonaparte, the nephew and pretender, who overthrew the French Republic in 1852 and became the last emperor of France. Bonaparte created, from the dregs of the socio-economic system, the foundation of a mass movement. He called it the Society of December the 10th. He just as well could have called it the Brownshirts. Hitler would have easily recognized it.

Revolutionary mobilization of the periphery does not occur in a day. And, in a legitimate democratic society, it will most likely bring chaos, dislocation, and division, but it will not bring about major political change. Nonetheless, for those committed to an ideological view of the world where chaos is the paving stone to revolution, means are significant.

The Republican Party’s Multiethnic, Working-Class Coalition Is Taking Shape Republicans can and should aggressively fight the culture war with the aim of victory, but it must not lose sight of the economic issues that helped propel Trump’s insurgency.  By Josh Hammer

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/09/the-republican-partys-multiethnic-working-class-coalition-is-taking-shape/

In the 2016 Republican Party presidential primary, decades of dissonance between the party’s aggrieved grassroots and its blinkered elite spilled out into the open. For years, the chasm widened between the GOP’s heartland base, the river valley-dwelling “Somewheres” from David Goodhart’s 2017 book, The Road to Somewhere, and the party’s bicoastal “Anywhere” rulers. The foot-soldier Republican “Somewheres,” disproportionately church-attending and victimized by job outsourcing and the opioid crisis, felt betrayed by the more secular, ideologically inflexible Republican “Anywheres.”

Donald Trump, lifelong conservative “outsider” and populist dissenter from bicoastal “Anywhere” orthodoxy on issues pertaining to trade, immigration, and China, coasted to the GOP’s presidential nomination. He did so notwithstanding the all-hands-on-deck pushback from leading right-leaning “Anywhere” bastions, encapsulated by National Review magazine’s dedication of an entire issue to, “Against Trump.” Trump’s subsequent victory in the 2016 general election sent the conservative intellectual movement, as well as the Republican Party itself, into a deep state of introspection.

Trump’s victory was primarily propelled by a white working-class revolt, but the emergence during his presidency of a deeply censorious and anti-American left—epitomized by the Democrats’ outrageous conduct during the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation battle and the destructive “1619 riots” last summer—opened the door for a broader working-class, pro-America political coalition. By Election Day 2020, that multiethnic, working-class conservative coalition had begun to take more definite shape. Trump lost a nail-biter of an election, but the GOP made massive inroads in crucial black and Hispanic communities, such as Florida’s Miami-Dade County and the heavily Mexican counties dotting Texas’ Rio Grande Valley.

‘Antiracist’ Hate Much of what passes for “antiracism” today is actually thinly veiled anti-white hate. By Alexander Zubatov

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/09/antiracist-hate/

In a recent article for The Atlantic, Ibram X. Kendi argues that those of us who are calling out the increasingly blatant and barefaced anti-white bigotry of many powerful figures on the woke Left are merely echoing a long-standing white supremacist trope. 

“[T]hat anti-racism is harmful to white people is one of the basic mantras of white-supremacist ideology,” Kendi argues, and then proceeds to plunge readers into a historical mishmash in which decontextualized statements by actual white supremacists are juxtaposed and conflated with similarly decontextualized statements by entirely mainstream figures across the political spectrum to manufacture white supremacist guilt by association. 

Kendi, certainly no stranger to bad arguments, is one of America’s foremost racial extremists. Among other things, he has absurdly called for the establishment of a Chinese Cultural Revolution-style federal “Department of Antiracism” charged with investigating private racism and monitoring racist speech. He is part of a larger woke Left counteroffensive that aims to label as white supremacists all those who question the divisive poison injected into our collective bloodstream by critical race theory and its many knowing and unwitting adherents. 

The ruse undoubtedly has succeeded in gaslighting many well-meaning Americans, who have no desire to stand on the same side of history as white nationalists, segregationists, Nazis, neo-Nazis, and Klansmen. But, beyond all its other flaws, Kendi’s broad-brush painting fails insofar as it implicitly imagines that all the practitioners of what goes by the name of “antiracism” are either on the side of the devil or else, as he thinks, of the angels. As ever, the devil is in the details—and the details reveal lots of angry little devils at work. 

Martin Luther King, Jr., after all, was also fighting for “antiracism” when he crusaded against segregation and genuine injustice and planted his battle-flag on the noble ground of judging each person as an individual, not a color. Most everyone today would agree that such a view embodies and expresses love, not hatred, whether of white people or of anyone else. 

It is equally plain, however, that not everyone who might have been or might be identified with the cause of civil rights falls into that same hallowed category, whether in the 1960s or today. The black nationalist Nation of Islam—along with its Rev. Elijah Muhammad, so unforgettably depicted by James Baldwin in The Fire Next Time—categorized as a hate group by even the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center, is a clear example of people deploying the mantle of civil rights to perpetuate antiwhite race hatred. Kendi’s obfuscation notwithstanding, there are many similar examples hiding in plain sight among us today.

The key question is how to tell the difference. How do we differentiate between, on the one hand, genuine, progressive efforts aimed at the ultimate goal of moving towards a harmonious, post racial republic and, on the other hand, divisive racial bigotry masquerading as progressive politics? The answer, alas, is that there is no formula that cracks the code. 

Fauci on Film White coat supremacy in cinéma vérité. Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/fauci-film-lloyd-billingsley/

EXCERPTS

Dr. Anthony Fauci, Joe Biden’s chief medical advisor, claims that his critics are “really criticizing science because I represent science.” That was also the theme of Fauci, a hagiographical documentary released back on October 6.

According to Disney+ promotional materials, Fauci is “the ultimate public servant” facing attacks from adversaries, with “science increasingly caught in the crosshairs.” Fortunately, a more cinéma vérité portrayal has been around for some time.

Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in Communist China, where gain-of-function research could be conducted in secret, with no accountability. In early 2020, Fauci praised China’s handling of the pandemic and initially opposed President Trump’s ban on travel from China. Like Ash, Fauci basically let the Covid virus come aboard.

In similar style in November, 2021, Fauci delayed a travel ban on Omicron-infected African countries and quickly announced that Omicron had arrived in the USA, just in time for the holidays. If some replicated scientific study supported these developments, it has yet to be made public.

With “this degree of transmissibility,” Omicron is going to be “all over,” proclaimed Dr. Fauci, who ought to know. The research NIAID funded at the WIV aimed to increase, not decrease, the transmissibility and lethality of viruses. For Fauci, the covid virus is the perfect organism. It can’t be killed and appears in endless variation. The virus empowers bureaucrats and politicians to impose restrictions, shut down sectors of the economy, demonize their critics, spend vast amounts of money, and portray themselves as heroes.

Anthony Fauci is most responsible for the lockdowns that wrecked the surging Trump economy and inflicted untold suffering on millions of people. Fauci backed New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who sent some 15,000 people to their deaths in nursing homes. Cuomo claimed he was following federal policy, but when CNN asked Fauci if that was true, the man who claims to represent science declined to answer.

The robot science officer Ash had no conscience or remorse. Like Ash, Dr. Fauci holds back any admissions of error or lapses in judgment. The NIAID boss, soon to turn 81, shows little if any sympathy with embattled Americans. Unlike Ash, Fauci has an extensive back story.

Anthony Fauci earned a medical degree in 1966 but his bio shows no advanced degrees in molecular biology or biochemistry. To avoid treating wounded American GIs in Vietnam, Fauci took a cushy “yellow beret” job at the National Institutes of Health. 

Fauci became NIAID boss in 1984 but Nobel laureate Kary Mullis, who earned a PhD in biochemistry from UC Berkeley, thought Fauci was unqualified. According to Mullis, inventor of the polymerase chain reaction, Fauci “doesn’t understand electron microscopy and he doesn’t understand medicine. He should not be in a position like he’s in.” But he is, and now claims to represent science itself. That smacks of megalomania, but there’s more to the man.

Fauci wields executive-level power but never has to face the voters or secure the consent of the governed.  As Joe Biden said on December 2, “Hey look, who’s president? Fauci.” Biden thus certifies white coat supremacy, a form of totalitarianism. If that seems a stretch, consider what Fauci told a McGill University audience in October: 

“There comes a time when you do have to give up what you consider your individual right of making your own decision, for the greater good of society.”  The ultimate public servant thus reveals his inner Duce, his inner Stalin.

Fauci and NIH boss Francis Collins both lied about funding gain-of-function research. Both deserve a criminal investigation but that is unlikely under the Biden Junta. With this crew, white coat supremacists stand above the law.

Wealthy Leftists Demand Poor White Kids in Appalachia be Taught They’re Racist Maybe they can drive by in their limos and teach the hungry kids about their white privilege. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/wealthy-leftists-demand-poor-white-kids-appalachia-daniel-greenfield/

The son of a bank vice president decided to teach about “white privilege” to his students in Sullivan County, Tennessee where the per capita income is $28,429.

After he was fired, the media decided to turn him into a victim.

“He Taught About White Privilege and Got Fired. Now He’s Fighting to Get His Job Back,” the headlines blared. A GoFundMe for Matthew Hawn by his sister, a principal in the Tennessee public school system, has already raised over $55,000 of its projected $85,000 goal.

That’s more money than a lot of the locals in Appalachia would be likely to earn in a year’s time.

Sullivan County is 95% white and 2% black. The rate of hungry children in the region is double the national rate and a third of those children live in Sullivan County.

At Sullivan Central High School, where Hawn decided to teach about white privilege, 96% of the students are white, 1% are Hispanic, another 1% are Asian, and the number of black students is too small to count.

41% of the students are eligible for the free lunch program. That means their parents meet federal poverty guidelines. Another 9% qualify for the reduced lunch program which indicates that their parents don’t earn very much.

Even though half the student body at Sullivan Central is low income, the graduation rate is 90% and the students rank in the top 20% for reading proficiency.

You can understand why Hawn, who had taught for 16 years, decided to introduce them to the concept of white privilege.

The article that helped debut Hawn’s sob story to the wealthy progressives of the nation who showered his GoFundMe with cash began by describing the  “social studies teacher in rural Tennessee” who “was driving to work listening to NPR” which was going on about racism.

It’s hard to envision a better summary of the culture clash between lefty elites and America.