RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/were-all-jews-now-supreme-court-free-exercise-yeshiva-university-lgbtq-student-club-judaism-pride-emergency-petition-11663016097?mod=opinion_featst_pos1

In mid-1960s Brooklyn, my dad was stopped at a traffic light when my brothers and I noticed a group of odd-looking men on the street corner, all with long beards, dark coats and hats. “Who are they?” we asked, pointing.

My father said something along the lines of “they are like us.” We didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about. What he meant was that their strong religious beliefs made them look strange to society—and as Catholics we did too, even if our views weren’t manifested in our clothing.

More than 60 years later, these words come back to me as Yeshiva University was granted an 11th-hour reprieve Friday by the Supreme Count. The school had filed an emergency petition with Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Sept. 2, hoping to stay a Manhattan judge’s order that the university grant official recognition to the Yeshiva University Pride Alliance in accord with New York City’s Human Rights Law. The school had decided an official LGBTQ student club wouldn’t be consistent with Torah values at the heart of its identity.

Yeshiva University isn’t just any Jewish school. It is the flagship institution of Modern Orthodoxy, committed to the idea that Jews can be at once fully Orthodox and fully engaged with the world. Arguably it is the sweet spot between Haredi Judaism, which tends to keep the outside world at bay, and Reform Judaism, whose embrace of modernity can over time erode Jewish distinctiveness.

New York says Yeshiva doesn’t qualify for a religious exemption. The argument seems to be that because it is incorporated as an educational institution—its motto is Torah Umadda, roughly, Torah plus secular knowledge—it can’t claim to be a religious institution and therefore has no right to an exemption.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/09/13/who-will-save-americans-from-a-weaponized-irs/

Our American republic did quite well for nearly a century without the IRS or its forerunner, the Office of the Commissioner of Revenue. Today, federal “revenooers” are the greatest threat to freedom in a country where liberty is already being lost at an alarming rate.

The IRS is more than a mere revenue collector for the federal government. It has often been used an instrument of intimidation, even terror, against political foes, and those who might not be so enthusiastic about paying income taxes, or simply have a financial hardship that limits their ability to pay.

Administrations all the way back to Franklin Roosevelt’s have used the IRS to target their opponents. Elliott Roosevelt, one of FDR’s sons, said his father “may have been the originator of the concept of employing the IRS as a weapon of political retribution.”

And of course most of us recall the IRS sitting on and rejecting applications for tax-exempt status for groups that were trying to organize against the policies of Barack Obama, essentially barring their existence.

Now it’s Joe Biden “turn” to unleash the pain. His misleadingly named Inflation Reduction Act created, as we noted earlier, “​​a small army of IRS shock troops who will abet the progressive-socialist political complex’s consolidation of raw political power while wrecking families, individuals, and small businesses.”

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2022/09/11/is-the-great-reset-kaput-n1628618

Writing in The Epoch Times, CEO of GnS Economics Tuomas Malinen forecasts the imminent collapse of the European economy. Focusing on the ill-advised sanctions against Russia in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine and the shutting down of the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, he reports that “[m]any households and corporations are seeing their energy prices multiply by 10, or more, across the continent.” In the face of a massive spike in energy prices, skyrocketing inflation, the raising of interest rates, the crushing effect on asset markets and the European banking sector, and the explosion of a full-blown debt crisis, Malinen predicts the unraveling of the Eurozone and the possible collapse of the global financial system. The ripple effect would be unstoppable.

If Malinen is right—and his credentials are impeccable—what might the prospects be, in the midst of such carnage, for the Great Reset project, which envisions the corporate seizure of global governance and top-down management of economic affairs? Would the ensuing chaos render the Reset moot since the conditions for a social and economic revolution would be far too unstable for a coherent restructuring of society? Might we finally see the end of the nefarious Klaus Schwab, whose toxic dreams—corporate hegemony, the abolition of private property, and the eclipse of  democratic accountability while civil society becomes little more than window dressing—would have turned to rubble?

As Richard Morrison writes in National Review Capital, “The global regulatory cartel that technocrats such as Schwab envision—a system of supranational policymaking that insulates politicians and CEOs from the demands and expectations of their most important constituents—is exactly the course of action that will end…the amazing growth, health, education and prosperity” that the free-market system has created. Such is the policy that Klaus and his Davos minions would pursue, which the current imbroglio might well put paid to. There would be scarce maneuvering room to set the Schwabian program in place.

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.