RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/10/the_war_for_internet_freedom_has_just_begun.html

I have heard it said many times over the years that President Bill Clinton and his inner circle were apprehensive about the rise of the internet right from its infancy.  While university clubs and lonely tech pioneers were generating public excitement by connecting people all over the planet, Clinton and his crew feared the internet for what it signified: an end to the government’s monopoly over information.

If just any old citizen could broadcast news to the world over cyberspace, none of the government’s traditional methods for regulating knowledge would continue to work.  Having a White House press corps, after all, has always had little to do with keeping government power in check and an awful lot to do with keeping potentially damaging information in house, supervised, and under control.  What better way to monitor and shape the news of tomorrow than to stuff all the White House correspondents into one small space for direct and easy manipulation?  Should CBS or NBC or The New York Times stumble upon a story too embarrassing for those in power, there is always some bargain to be made or some threat to be leveled that can keep that information bottled up.

The “free press,” in other words, has always been filled with information “gatekeepers” no less corruptible than any other humans and just as capable of intentionally keeping the public in the dark as they are of letting in some occasional light.  For what it’s worth, Clinton’s worries were warranted, and a complete unknown named Matt Drudge nearly took down his presidency with a story about a stained blue dress that several prestige news outlets had refused to cover.  The somewhat secret war over information would never be the same.

While we watch government-induced censorship increasingly squeeze the free flow of information today, it is easy to throw up our hands in despair and presume that the light of freedom will inexorably dim.  I encourage you instead to see government-engineered threats to free speech as further evidence that both totalitarianism and freedom are on the march.  Powerful institutions do not work this hard to silence voices unless they are deeply afraid.  The push for control is inextricably linked to the perception of fear.  The harder that authorities push to control what we say, the more clearly they reveal their own fear.  This is a sign of weakness.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/12/joe-biden-plays-the-old-ugly-american/

The Left used to accuse imperialist, resource-hungry Yanquis in Washington of cutting selfish deals with illiberal dictatorships in Latin America to grab their natural resources. 

How odd then that Joe Biden is now begging the despicable Maduro regime in Venezuela—corrupt, murderous, and anti-American—to produce more of its oil solely to send northward to America. 

Biden is quite willing to ease sanctions and condone the human rights abuses of Maduro—if his dictatorship will just open its oil spigots before the November midterm elections. 

Biden in 2020 campaigned on the supposed evil nature of the Saudi Arabian monarchy. Yet after vainly entreating Venezuela, Iran, and Russia, it was inevitable that Biden would once again supplicate the Saudis to pump more oil. 

Biden even pleaded with OPEC to increase its output and thus lower the world price of energy—again before the midterm elections. 

Biden, remember, has a bad habit of bragging that he lowered gas prices at the pump when the natural volatility of the petroleum markets leads to a fractional decrease. But once prices spike, he is utterly silent about his own role in limiting U.S. oil and gas output.

So, was it any surprise that the Saudis became the fourth non-democratic regime to refuse Biden’s entreaties? During the 2020 campaign, when gas prices were dirt cheap, and when then candidate Biden was demagoguing about ending fossil fuel, he opportunistically libeled the Saudis a “pariah” state. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/white-lives-matter-obviously/

The Black Lives Matter movement is a sham, based wholly on lies surrounding the tragic death of George Floyd. Like so many other deaths, Floyd’s was trivialized and profaned by Marxist radicals masquerading as “social justice warriors.” People of his own ethnic extraction commoditized his flesh and blood, exhumed his bones, and wielded them as weapons in a dirty little political war.

Democrat party leadership, breathless with excitement, knelt in solidarity with the forces of anarchy and destabilization — the fellow travelers, foot soldiers, and shock troops of global Marxist power. Social justice is a trojan horse for the asymmetric espionage cadres of today’s Axis of Evil — Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. BLM is just another tool in the totalitarian arsenal, aimed at corroding liberty by corrupting the social, moral, and cultural ties that bind us.

Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) and Candace Owens know all this and have trolled BLM hucksters, Democrat party lickspittles, and their propagandists in the legacy media by dropping a fashion hand grenade. During the Yeezy show at Paris Fashion week, Candace and Ye strolled into the spotlight sporting shirts printed with the revolutionary slogan — White Lives Matter.

The reaction from the establishment were hysterics and rage rivaling the intensity of the Spanish Inquisition. No wonder, since the same animating evil runs through the veins of every tyrant including those wearing tailored suits who even now haunt the halls of the White House and Capitol Hill.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/faucis-final-offensive/

Dr. Anthony Fauci, longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) is defending a new grant to the EcoHealth Alliance, headed by Peter Daszak. The names may ring a bell with embattled Americans.

The EcoHealth Alliance has received tens of millions in research dollars from the federal government and partnered with China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) since 2004. Back in 2019, Dr. Fauci funded the Alliance to collaborate with the WIV on gain-of-function research, which makes viruses more lethal and transmissible. Dr. Fauci was “untruthful” about funding such research at the WIV, controlled by China’s Communist Party and unaccountable to American taxpayers.

As The Epoch Times reports, the new grant comes only weeks after the National Institutes of Health, the parent bureaucracy of NIAID, terminated a grant to the EcoHealth Alliance. It seems the WIV twice declined NIH requests “to hand over laboratory records so that it could review the research.” As The Intercept reports, Fauci’s support for the new grant has drawn pushback from medical scientists.

“It is disturbing that additional funding continues to be awarded for the same high-risk research that may have caused the current pandemic, before there has been a national investigation of the origin of the current pandemic,” molecular biologist Richard Ebright explained. The Rutgers scientist was also disturbed that “additional funding continues to be awarded to a contractor that the NIH has reported to have repeatedly and seriously violated contractual terms and conditions of a grant.”

The new grant is for “Analyzing the potential for future bat coronavirus emergence in Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam.” Fauci’s support should come as no surprise.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/10/13/the-livelihood-thieves-of-washington-d-c/

Crime will be fresh on the minds of voters during November’s midterm elections. But there is no greater robbery than that being planned by the Biden administration. What it’s proposing is a government-backed mugging.

In essence, the White House wants to outlaw gig work in America. No, it’s not saying so outright. The Biden Labor Department obscures that harsh reality with words meant to deceive. Labor Secretary Marty Walsh says the department’s proposal is needed to safeguard “​​our nation’s most vulnerable workers,” and ensure they are not deprived “of their federal labor protections.”

Left out is the part that, should the proposal become policy, millions of Americans will be stripped of their jobs and income. Under its rule, the Labor Department would be free to “determine whether a worker is an employee or an independent contractor under the Fair Labor Standards Act.” And it will determine in every case that the worker in question must be a hired employee, no longer free to continue his or her job as an independent contractor.

How can we be so sure as to say “every case”? There’s precedent. Almost three years ago Assembly Bill 5, passed and signed in 2019, went into effect in California. The standard it put in place to determine if workers could remain independent contractors is so high that it is virtually impossible to reach. Everyone has to be a hired employee or their job is lost.

But couldn’t businesses simply hire gig workers? Sure, some could. But many companies, especially growing companies, rely on independent contracting because the steep costs of employment that are mandated by government make hiring unaffordable.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/wholesale-prices-rise-for-first-time-in-three-months-and-show-inflation-still-raging-11665578458?mod=home-page

Producer price index climbs 0.4% in September — double the Wall Street forecast

The numbers: U.S. wholesale prices rose 0.4% in September to mark the first increase in three months, signaling little progress in the Federal Reserve’s fight to vanquish high inflation.

Economists polled by The Wall Street Journal had forecast a 0.2% gain. Wholesale prices had fallen in August and July entirely because of declining gasoline prices.

The increase in wholesale prices over the past year, meanwhile, fell slightly to 8.5% from 8.7% in the prior month. Inflation is still running near a 40-year high, however.

A separate measure of wholesale prices that strips out volatile food and energy costs also increase 0.4% last month, the government said Wednesday. That was a larger than expected.

The increase in these so-called core prices over the past year was flat at 5.6%.

The change in wholesale prices offers clues on how much inflation is increasing. The consumer price index due on Thursday gives a better idea of how much the cost of living is going up for U.S. households.

Big picture: The Fed’s belated but aggressive strategy to raise interest rates to reduce inflation hasn’t shown much effect so far. Prices are still rising rapidly.