RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/09/05/can-bidens-jobs-number-be-trusted-any-more/

President Joe Biden has staked so much on his claim that he’s “created” 13.5 million jobs since taking office that it’s worth asking if his Labor Department is now goosing job growth figures to help him out.

On Friday just before the holiday weekend, Labor released its estimates for job growth in August – which it said worked out to 187,000, beating economists’ forecasts.

But at the same time, the government cut the job growth numbers for the previous two months by a total of 110,000.

As a matter of fact, Labor has quietly cut its initial job growth estimates for every month this year.

Based on its initial estimates, the economy should have created 2.2 million jobs in 2023. Now Commerce says that number is less than 1.9 million. In other words, it’s exaggerated job gains by more than 300,000 – or 19%.

“Every single month this year has seen its payroll numbers revised down. It’s difficult to stress how unusual this is as it’s so statistically unlikely. There is clearly something wrong with the estimations being done by President Joe Biden’s Department of Labor,” said EJ Antoni, an economist at the Heritage Foundation.

Earlier this year, we noted that Biden’s jobs record could be even more exaggerated because of the way the Labor Department fills in gaps in its survey data. We wrote that:

Jonathan Pingle, chief U.S. economist at UBS, told the Journal ‘that the level of nonfarm payroll employment at the end of 2022 was likely too high by several hundred thousand, and that the overstatement might have carried into 2023.’

The White House touted the August jobs news, with Biden declaring that “America is now in one of the strongest job-creating periods in our history — in the history of our country.”

He also bragged that “more than 700,000 people joined the labor force last month, which means the highest share of working-age Americans are in the workforce now than at any time in the past 20 years.”

He added, “People are coming off the sidelines, getting back to their workplaces.”

But that’s not what’s happening at all.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/austins-nightmarish-escalating-crime/

On the heels of the death of George Floyd, hundreds flooded to the streets, convincing city officials that cutting the budget of our police officers would be a necessary step in “making things right.” But now, years later, we’re seeing the effect of such a campaign, which is not only hurting thousands of fellow officers, but also the cities that they desperately tried so hard to protect.

One of those cities is Austin, Texas. That’s right, one of the sparkling jewels of that great state has now fallen to a higher level of violence. It’s seen a massive increase in homicide over the past few years; and its police presence has dwindled, to the point that the city’s own Police Chief has had enough.

Thomas Villarreal, president of the Austin Police Association, recently appeared on Fox & Friends to discuss the hazardous actions of city officials. He discussed how the city cut a massive $150 million from the police budget three years ago, and how the force hasn’t bounced back since.

“We just continue to have a city council that doesn’t show its police officers that [it] cares about them,” he explained.

Villarreal continued, “Back in December 2017, we had a city council vote down a police contract for the first time in the history of negotiating contracts. And, you know, we pushed forward to 2018, tried to get back under contract. Our city decided to go through what they called reimagining police oversight. And then, you know, we got back under contract.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/reparations-for-everyone/

For all the blather about reparations and who owes what to whom, we ought to step back and consider who among those who reside in the United States have been aggrieved, how recently, for how long, what was the impact at the time, are there ramifications today, and what is the overall assessment?

Many ethnic and racial groups at various times throughout our history made significant contributions, which across the broad swath of today’s population, remain virtually unknown.

Focusing on the Chinese

European Jews arriving in the 1890s and again in the 1910s were kept out of every corporation of prominence, denied housing, shunned by the guilds, and kept at a distance socially by “polite” society. The Irish were once considered vermin. So, pay their descendants reparations? The Chinese workers in the 1890s along the Pacific coast – Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle – were poorly treated. Pay them as well?

In the 1800s, for example, the Central Pacific Railroad in California (that hotbed of reparations proposals) employed as many as 12,000 Chinese as young as age 12. The pool of these workers represented America’s largest industrial workforce. Nine out of 10 people employed by the Central Pacific Railroad were first-generation Chinese in America – not merely of Chinese ancestry.

Precious little had been recorded or even noted about this vital workforce, while European and American workers of the same era had been described and characterized at length.

In 2012, the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America project assembled a massive collection of oral accounts, documents, photos, and other paraphernalia on this area of American history. This Chinese railroad workforce, it has since been determined, provided the lion’s share of the most labor-intensive tasks: cutting through granite or blasting through it when needed and effectively laying track across the far western states.

@billmaher

: “The woke believe race is first and foremost the thing you should always see everywhere, which I find interesting because that used to be the position of the Ku Klux Klan.”

BILL MAHER: I’m always trying to make the case that liberal is a different animal than woke. Because it is. You can be woke with all the nonsense that now implies, but don’t say that somehow it is an extension of liberalism. It is most often an undoing of liberalism. You can have your points of view and your positions, but don’t try to piggyback on what I have always believed.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/09/04/the-tyranny-of-google/

EXCERPT:

Google turns 25-years-old today. Back then, it was a given that technology would change the world for the better. And by studying the practices of the founders, we could improve ourselves, too. So, how well does this assessment of Google hold up today?

In its early years, Google embodied technical excellence and good taste. Its original (and for a while, only) service was a web search engine based on a simple borrowed idea. The search results were rated according to the density of in-bound links, just as academic papers are ranked by the number of times they are cited. This method gave us results far superior to those of its rival search engines.

Google also benefited from having a certain mystique. Its front page – google.com – was immaculately clean and uncluttered. The service was very fast and helpful, too, correcting your misspellings. Initially, Google seemed to have no interest in serving us any other products or services, or apparently, even making money. Occasionally, the front page featured a whimsical cartoon. Google seemed to embody the kind of a shiny, hopeful liberal idealism expressed in Gene Roddenberry’s original Star Trek. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google’s boyish founders, would be our companions to the future, just as Kirk and Spock had been.

At one point in his book, Jarvis allows himself a dark thought: What would happen if Google fell from its saintly standards and tried to screw us? We needn’t worry, he assures us: ‘Google could lose our trust the moment it misuses the data it has about us or decides to use our growing dependence on it as a chokehold to charge us (as cable companies, phone companies and airlines do).’

Such optimism seems very naïve today. It is still true that Google does not charge us, as consumers, directly. But multiple authorities across several continents have judged that it does operate a chokehold on competition, and this costs us all a lot.

For example, in 2022, the EU levied a record fine against Alphabet, Google’s umbrella company. Having once vowed never to detain people on their journey to another destination longer than necessary, Google now seeks to keep people on its own properties for as long as possible. According to the European Commission, Google abused its market dominance to give an illegal advantage to its shopping service. Google also dominates dozens of markets that once had thriving competition, from smartphone platforms to web browsers, all of which serve as funnels to deliver us to its advertising business. Google also participated in a secret wage-fixing cartel against US technology workers that suppressed wages by some $3 billion, according to one complainant in a class-action lawsuit.