RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/maxine-waters-blew-sam-bankman-fried-a-kiss/

Sam Bankman-Fried, according to Victor Davis Hanson, “may have robbed perhaps a million investors, and along with them hundreds of large institutional investors.” He “protected from federal securities regulators, had drained off, lost, hidden, or spent billions of dollars of other people’s money.” Now his dear friend Maxine Waters (D-Incitement), who was caught on video blowing him a kiss in December 2021, will be leading an investigation into his sleazy FTX Ponzi scheme as Chair of the House Financial Services Committee. Waters initially stepped on a rake when she said that she wouldn’t be subpoenaing her pal Sam, but the winsome congresswoman backtracked after a firestorm and insisted that it was a “lie” that she didn’t plan to subpoena him. So will she actually do so? That remains unclear.

CNBC reported Wednesday that Waters “told the panel’s Democrats she doesn’t plan to subpoena former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried to testify at a Dec. 13 hearing about the crypto exchange’s rapid demise, according to people with direct knowledge of the conversation.” She “informed committee members of her decision at a private meeting Tuesday with Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler on Capitol Hill, these people said, declining to be named in order to speak freely about the private discussion.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/12/musk_has_some_new_faucibased_pronouns_that_you_are_going_to_love.html

Elon Musk has dropped another major revelation, this time about Anthony Fauci, the shriveled, malevolent bureaucrat who is responsible for profoundly damaging the American economy, destroying Americans’ health, and putting Biden in the White House. However, if the response from the left to this latest news continues to be the same response with which it greeted earlier Twitter revelations, we may finally have the answer to that old philosophical question: If a tree falls in an empty forest, does it make a sound?

To date, the Twitter documents have revealed that Twitter was working arm-in-arm with the Biden campaign, the Democrat party, and federal law enforcement to silence conservatives, including the President of the United States, to amplify Democrats, and to stifle any factual reporting that would reflect badly on Biden. The government bureaucrats, by colluding with Twitter to silence political speech, were violating the First Amendment. Meanwhile, Twitter was committing a fraud on the public (and its advertisers) by using covert means and lies (including lies to Congress) to hide its conduct perverting free speech in America.

What’s become clear is that Musk, taking a page out of Andrew Breitbart’s and James O’Keefe’s book, is steadily escalating the nature of the revelations. This is a technique that sees a promised expose start out kind of boring so that leftists can say, “That’s not news,” or “You already knew that,” or “Who cares?” However, as the story ever so slowly gains traction, the conservative outlet begins to produce more serious material highlighting gross misconduct.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/12/elon-musk-is-right/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

His vision for Twitter largely reflects the proper instincts about free speech and transparency.

A more transparent Twitter will be a better Twitter.

Forget, for a moment, the arguments over the First Amendment and Section 230, and look at the matter from the perspective of the consumer. Twitter is a business, and I am a customer, and from the perspective of a customer, I naturally prefer clarity to murkiness. As a daily user of the product, I gain nothing from opacity, or from complexity, or from caprice, because they all make the service worse for me. If I follow someone, I want to see their tweets. If I search for someone, I want to find their account. If a given topic or person or claim is trending, I want to know about it without its being filtered through the personal predilections of other people. Because Twitter is a platform on which people write, I want the staff who work there to be instinctively supportive of free expression, skeptical of government pressure, and loathe to tip the scales in either direction. And if, for whatever reason, some superintendence of my conversations is deemed necessary, I want to know about it without euphemisms.

If my account has been suppressed wholesale, I want to be told that. If my tweet is too offensive to be shared widely, I want to be informed of it. If I am no longer permitted to use the platform — whether temporarily or permanently — I want to be apprised of which rules I have broken and why. I have no legal or constitutional right to any of these provisions, nor would I claim one. Twitter is a private company, and I would like to keep it that way. But to accept that I cannot recruit the state to my side is not to shed all my opinions, and, as a user, I have a whole bunch of opinions to share.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/12/12/the-donald-makes-tim-cook-do-the-right-thing-again/

A popular game and teaching tool in various forms and guises – “What’s Missing from this Picture?” – seems highly applicable to a Wall Street Journal report that Apple Inc. “has accelerated plans to shift some of its production outside China.” The goal: “ship 40% to 45% of iPhones from India,” with manufacturing of “products such as AirPods, smartwatches and laptops” heading to Vietnam.

It seems Apple is perturbed – and judging by CEO Tim Cook’s studied reticence, embarrassed – by goings-on at factories of Chinese supplier Foxconn.

The Journal helpfully embedded video of authorities beating workers protesting weeks of COVID-driven imprisonment in their facility, closed-off break areas, and dining halls, and carryout meals they schlepped to dormitories a half-hour walk away.  Workers jumped fences to escape.

The article also cataloged the shortcomings of Vietnam – too small population-wise to match China’s manufacturing sites with hundreds of thousands of workers – and India – patchwork regulations that “saddle (Apple) with obligations.”

And, apparently, neither offers China’s “literate and diligent workforce, political stability” and “huge local market for Apple’s products.” Per an ex-Foxconn executive, “They’re not doing high-end phones in India and Vietnam. No other places can do them.”

“No other places,” eh? Catching on to “what’s missing in this picture?” Maybe a country with traditions of large-scale manufacturing and global leadership in “high-end phone” development? High levels of literacy, and laborers clocking some of the world’s longest workweeks? Not to mention the historically “hugest” market for Apple products?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-lawsuits-cost-you-3-600-a-year-tort-system-chamber-of-commerce-institute-for-legal-reform-report-11670460820?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

We always knew trial lawyers were filling their pockets, but it’s still a surprise to learn how much they’ve been emptying ours. The total economic cost of the U.S. tort system in 2020 was $443 billion, according to a recent study by the Chamber of Commerce Institute for Legal Reform. That’s 2.1% of GDP, and it works out to $3,621 per household.

Only a small percentage of American families are involved in tort cases or class-action lawsuits in a given year, but the burden of jackpot payouts is carried by nearly everyone. The costs spread through the economy in the form of higher insurance premiums that fall on nearly every family, either directly (car insurance) or indirectly (medical malpractice or product-liability insurance).

And costs are rising. Between 2016 and 2020 the tort system grew 6% a year, the study says, more than inflation and GDP growth. Commercial liability grew the fastest, at 7% a year. Also alarming is that only half the money goes to injured parties. “We estimate that only 53 percent of the total expenditures of the tort system were paid to claimants,” the authors write. In other words, “for every dollar paid in compensation to claimants, 88 cents were paid in legal and other costs.”

The boom in tort costs is owing to the boom in litigation financing, in which investors fund lawsuits and then claim a portion of the winnings.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/there-were-17-americans-in-russian-prisons-only-1-mattered-to-the-left/

Here’s another of the men whom Biden left behind to extract a black lesbian pothead who hates America because she embodies his rotten base.

 A teacher from Oakmont who’s been detained in Russia for more than a year remains in custody.

This summer, Butler native Marc Fogel was sentenced to 14 years in a maximum security prison after he was caught with 17 grams of medical marijuana for a spine condition.

The U.S. State Department had previously asked Russia to release American citizen Fogel on humanitarian grounds. Prior to that request, a group of nine bipartisan senators called on Secretary of State Antony Blinken to immediately designate Fogel as “wrongfully detained.”

Not a priority. If Marc wants to become one, he needs to claim that he changed gender, learn to play basketball and jeer the national anthem.

He’d still have to overcome the handicap of “being assigned white at birth”.

Fogel, 61, was arrested in August 2021 for possessing 17 grams of what he said was medical marijuana. The former history teacher, like Griner, was arrested in Moscow when the pot was found in his luggage.

Fogel was sentenced to 14 years in prison in June — just over a month before Griner was handed a nine-year sentence.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/12/09/all-the-times-twitter-execs-lied-to-our-faces-about-their-insidious-shadowbanning/

Remember all the times Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and top Twitter lawyer Vijaya Gadde assured us that Twitter neither shadowbans nor targets conservatives? Well, they lied. 

In the second installment of Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files,” independent journalist Bari Weiss exposed how the Big Tech company was secretly “blacklisting” conservative tweets and users by keeping “disfavored” tweets from trending and secretly hiding whole accounts or topics without users’ knowledge.

One Twitter team, the “Strategic Response Team – Global Escalation Team” (SRT-GET), was reportedly committed to censoring “up to 200 ‘cases’” per day. Victims included prominent conservatives Dan Bongino and Charlie Kirk, as well as Stanford University professor and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.

Another secret censorship group, the “Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support team” (SIP-PES), was responsible for the most “politically sensitive decisions.” The group included Gadde, Dorsey, trust and safety head Yoel Roth, former CEO Parag Agrawal, and others, and it was personally responsible for suppressing the viral Libs of TikTok Twitter account, among other high-profile censorship calls.

But remember when Twitter execs repeatedly insisted they didn’t engage in shadowbanning?

‘We Do Not Shadow Ban’

On July 25, 2018, Vice News reported that several prominent Republican politicians, such as Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, and Matt Gaetz, did not show up in a drop-down menu of automatically suggested searches, even when typing in the politicians’ names.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/12/the_supreme_outrage_of_bidens_idiotic_prisoner_swap_with_putin.html

Joe Biden, our all-American  foul-up, is holding true to his nature, as he recently made the worst deal on a prisoner swap ever on December 8, 2022, aside from Obama’s deal that swapped Bowe Bergdahl for four top Taliban jihadi terrorists, who now run Afghanistan’s government.  Seeing the public relations fantasy dance through his head and hoping to get a win that would deflect from all his administration’s miserable failures, from the economy to the border and more, Biden ordered the release of Viktor Bout, a miserable, death-dealing arms merchant who has left thousands of dead in his wake.  In exchange?  The return of Brittney Griner, a black, lesbian, anti-American, anti-God, anti-family, pot-headed basketball player, who has turned her back on America more than once.  Biden chose this swap rather than using the full weight of the U.S.’s resources to secure the release of Paul Whelan, a Marine veteran and a heterosexual male, who has spent the past four years in a Russian prison on false charges of espionage. 

Yes.  The P.R. optics heavily favored Griner over Whelan.

On December 8, the day the swap was announced, Representative Nicole Malliotakis (R-N.Y.) observed:

If [Joe Biden] is going to release a guy convicted of providing aid to a terrorist organization [and] conspiring to kill American citizens, he should have at least gotten BOTH Brittney Griner and Paul Whelan in return.

A U.S. Marine is left behind in another bad deal made by Biden.

All one is left to imagine is that the Biden regime really does want America’s enemies to win.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-smart-party-never-learns-democrats-self-reflection-elite-culture-media-universities-covid-inflation-election-excuses-11670592902?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

The most obvious change in American politics this century is the sorting of voters along educational lines. The Democrats are increasingly the party of educated urban elites; the GOP belongs to the white working class. The dispute is over suburban and minority voters. The latter still plump mostly for Democrats, although the party’s social radicalism is pushing them toward the GOP. Voters with impressive educational credentials tend to be Democrats, and those without them lean strongly Republican.

That one party is the educated party—that its members see themselves, in some respects accurately, as more cultured and informed than their opponents—has generated an intellectual pathology that is obvious to everyone but themselves. Adherents of the smart-people party have lost the capacity for self-criticism. Which on its face makes sense. If your views are by definition intelligent, those of your critics must be dumb. Who needs self-reflection?

We can start to understand the Democrats’ predicament by ridding ourselves of a set of metaphors. For a decade or more, we’ve been told that left and right live in “silos” or “bubbles” or “echo chambers” or “information cocoons.” The left watch MSNBC and read the New York Times, and the right watch Fox News and listen to talk radio.

Exacerbating this state of affairs, we’re told, are social-media platforms whose algorithms give politically attuned users only content they’re likely to agree with. Facile claims to the contrary, Facebook, Twitter and similar platforms don’t have this effect. A 2019 study, “Are Filter Bubbles Real?” by Axel Bruns of Queensland University Technology in Australia surveys a wide array of evidence and finds that social-media users on all sides get plenty of exposure to content with which they disagree. “Ironically,” Mr. Bruns writes in an aside, “echo chamber and filter bubble concepts may have become so popular with some journalists, media critics, and politicians because members of these professional classes are genuinely more likely to inhabit an information cocoon of sorts.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/09/wholesale-prices-rose-0point3percent-in-november-more-than-expected-despite-hopes-that-inflation-is-cooling.html

The producer price index, a measure of what companies get for their products in the pipeline, increased 0.3% for the month and 7.4% from a year ago.
A 38% surge in wholesale vegetable prices helped push the food index up by 3.3%, offsetting an identical 3.3% decline in energy costs.

Wholesale prices rose more than expected in November as food prices surged, dampening hopes that inflation could be headed lower, the Labor Department reported Friday.

The producer price index, a measure of what companies get for their products in the pipeline, increased 0.3% for the month and 7.4% from a year ago, which was the slowest 12-month pace since May 2021. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been looking for a 0.2% gain.

Excluding food and energy, core PPI was up 0.4%, also against a 0.2% estimate. Core PPI was up 6.2% from a year ago, compared with 6.6% in October.