UK inflation jumps to 30-year high of 5.4% as cost of living crisis deepens
An old saying applies here. "When America sneezes, the world catches cold". For instance: Greenie thinking in the Biden administration has led to various attacks and restrictions on the oil industry. Fracking in particular has been hit. So while America was an oil exporter under Trump it is now a net importer.. So America now has to buy lots of oil from overseas. And, as ever, increased demand moves prices upward. But that higher price is paid by everyone, not just Americans. And that's inflation -- or at least a substantial part of it. Oil price rises have effects across the board
There are of course other upward pressures on prices worldwide. Supply chain problems caused by Covid and the government response to it are a major factor too
UK inflation has risen to a near-30-year high of 5.4%, driven higher by rising prices for food, furniture, clothes and housing costs. This deepens the country’s cost of living crisis, and heaps pressure on the Bank of England to raise interest rates at its next meeting in February, following December’s surprise hike.
Sterling rose 0.8% against the dollar to $1.3837 after the data, and was also supported by the surge in UK bond yields. The two-year gilt yield rose to its highest level since March 2018.
Related: UK inflation rises to highest level in almost 30 years at 5.4%
Related: Inflation is back, and there’s plenty more in the pipeline
Related: ‘I’m not getting through the month’: five Britons on the cost of living crisis
Crude oil prices are up for a fourth day and hit seven-year highs, after a fire on a pipeline from Iraq to Turkey briefly halted oil flows, raising fears about supply. Brent crude touched $89.05 a barrel, its highest level since October 2014 while US light crude climbed as high as $87.08, also the highest since then.
The explosion that set off the fire on the pipeline in the southeastern Turkish province of Kahramanmaras was caused by a falling power pylon, not an attack, a senior security source told Reuters.
European stock markets are trading between 0.2% (Italy) and 1% (France) higher. On Wall Street, US stock indices were boosted by upbeat results from a spate of companies such the consumer giant Procter & Gamble and the banks Bank of America and Morgan Stanley, which wrapped up the bank earnings season.
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AT&T Gets Woke: 'White People, You are the Problem'
AT&T is getting woke....step two is to go broke...which is exactly what is going to happen if they keep up this nonsense.
In Christopher Rufo's latest article for City Journal, he exposed the communication company for teaching ideas that “racism is a uniquely white trait” and that white people are “the problem.”
Rufo is a leading reporter on the CRT-takeover of American companies and education.
He reported that AT&T’s CEO John Stankey launched a CRT-based program last year that sought to teach employees that the company has an “obligation to engage on this issue of racial injustice” and to agitate for “systemic reforms in police departments across the country.”
“According to a senior employee, who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity, managers at AT&T are now assessed annually on diversity issues, with mandatory participation in programs such as discussion groups, book clubs, mentorship programs, and race reeducation exercises. White employees, the source said, are tacitly expected to confess their complicity in “white privilege” and “systemic racism,” or they will be penalized in their performance reviews.
As part of the overall initiative, employees are asked to sign a loyalty pledge to “keep pushing for change,” with suggested “intentions” such as “reading more about systemic racism” and “challenging others’ language that is hateful.” “If you don’t do it,” the senior employee says, “you’re [considered] a racist.” AT&T did not respond when asked for comment," Rufo wrote.
He also exposed the program's internal portal, which insists that white people are to blame for racism. It tells employees, “White America, if you want to know who’s responsible for racism, look in the mirror.”
The portal also says, “White people, you are the problem. Regardless of how much you say you detest racism, you are the sole reason it has flourished for centuries.” Rufo also reports that the portal tells employees that “American racism is a uniquely white trait,” “Black people cannot be racist,” “ [white women} have been telling lies on black men since they were first brought to America in chains,” and that all whites “enjoy the opportunities and privileges that white supremacy affords [them].” Someone named Dahleen Glanton authored that page in the portal.
I am glad I have Verizon right about now.
https://dailypatriotreport.com/att-gets-woke-white-people-you-are-the-problem/
***************************************Judge rules against Michigan gov. Gretchen Whitmer and the mdhhs in lawsuit
Michigan’s proud residents have experienced some of the worst policy decisions in the nation. Only supplanted by certain excessive restrictions in New York and California, Michiganders have experienced the heavy hand of a power hunger governor.
Governor Gretchen Whitmer has bombarded Michigan people with an incessant number of tyrannical orders and restrictions. Nothing she has done has had any effect on case counts in her state. She is one of dozens of power hunger blue state governors who have abused COVID.
However, her orders have helped destroy hundreds of Michigan businesses. Nevertheless, one business may have helped to stem the tide of blue state governor destruction. The Iron Pig Smokehouse sued the state of Michigan, namely Governor Gretchen Whitmer.
The Northern Michigan restaurant sued to overturn Whitmer’s unscientific, tyrannical block on indoor dining. Otsego County Judge Colin Hunter ruled in favor of the restaurant’s managing partnership, Moore Murphy Hospitality LLC.
In November, at Whitmer’s order, the state health department closed indoor dining and placed a heavy restriction on capacity. The owner of the Iron Pig Smokehouse resisted. They defied the order, continuing to amass violations and the accompanying heavy fines.
The Gaylord restaurant filed a lawsuit in Otsego County District Court. The resulting decision by Judge Hunter is a welcome sense of relief for the thousands of businesses across the nation, business owners who have suffered through these unnecessary shutdowns.
The Iron Pig lawsuit requests $25,000 in damages. They allege, rightfully according to the Michigan Constitution, that Whitmer lacked the authority to impose such mandates. Judge Hunter says they are correct. Like other blue state governors, Whitmer violated her authority.
The court clearly indicated that “In order to have the full force and effect of law, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services emergency order must draw its authority from a lawful delegation of power.” The court focused on a precise constitutional question.
The ruling contends; the director of MDHHS did not have the authority to enact such a mandate, regardless of any order to do so from the Michigan governor. Furthermore, the ruling cited multiple precedents, establishing that the mandate violated the separation of powers.
In support of their legal argument, lawyers for the plaintiff drew on a Michigan Supreme Court ruling from last year. That ruling pointed to a 1945 case where it was ruled that a governor’s order to close bars and restaurants was unconstitutional.
Like every tyrannical lockdown and business closure leveled throughout liberal states, each is a violation of our constitutional rights. The evolution of COVID-19 has also proven these heavy-handed mandates to be unsuccessful at stemming any surge in cases.
These Draconian power grabs have done nothing but destroy American businesses. Thankfully, one Michigan judge applied common sense. Americans are exhausted from COVID-19. However, they are more exhausted by the senseless power grabs from liberal Democrats.
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Trump Banned From Banking
This did not get much attention when it broke a few weeks ago, so here it is again …
Do you remember when they said this would only happen to Alex Jones and Laura Loomer?
Any student of history knows that once the tyranny starts, it never ends.
The fact that they have chosen to go straight to the top first, for the man who was President of the United States yesterday speaks volumes about how emboldened these corporate cartels are.
The Hill reported:
A Florida bank announced Thursday that it has closed down former President Trump’s account, joining a growing list of entities that have cut ties with the former president following the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
In his financial disclosures, Trump had stated he had two money-market accounts with Banks United, The Washington Post reports. The accounts held somewhere between $5.1 million and $25.2 million.
“We no longer have any depository relationship with him,” said Banks United, without giving reasons for its decision to shutter the accounts.
Another Florida bank, Professional Bank, last week announced that it would be cutting ties with Trump, saying it would no longer conduct business with the former president or his organizations.
Signature Bank in New York and Deutsche Bank have also said they will no longer be conducting future business with Trump. Signature Bank notably took a strong stance against Trump and his allies in Congress, calling for him to resign and saying it would not conduct business with lawmakers who had objected to certifying the presidential election.
Deutsche Bank is seeking to resolve more than $300 million in loans, reportedly looking to offload the loans onto another lender due to the negative press their dealings with Trump has caused. Deutsche Bank’s relationship with the Trump Organization is under a civil investigation by New York attorney general Letitia James.’
Make no mistake, this will go down in history as one of the modern, digital, nights of the broken glass.
They did it to Trump … how long until they do it to me … or you?!
https://uafreport.com/mark/trump-banned-from-banking/
*************************************************What is the most brutal truth about Ayn Rand's beliefs?
Before I tell you what I consider the most obvious truths about Ayn Rand beliefs, I want to, first, dispel one of the most persistent myths about Ayn Rand, and also to fill out some context.
The myth is that Ayn Rand had been traumatized by the brutality of the Soviet regime; that her whole philosophy was supposedly a reaction to the horrors that she experienced in the early years of the USSR. The actual truth is (1) different; and also (2) complicated. The Soviet regime committed some astounding acts of brutality, but Rand experienced none of them. (And to the extent that she despised empathy, it is difficult to imagine that she was traumatized, or that her worldview was formed, by brutality that happened to other people.) Her family lost its pre-Revolutionary wealth, true, but that’s just one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is that her parents chose to throw their lot with the new regime knowing exactly what it was all about; they invested in it — not unlike how many of my fellow Americans today are willing to part with fortunes to install Trump as dictator. The Rozenbaums had ample means to do what plenty of other wealthy Russians did as the situation in late-czarist Russia heated up: transfer their wealth abroad and become respectable white emigres. France, Germany, the US, Australia, Argentina, Brazil — all these were wide-open to people like Ayn Rand’s parents. They chose to stay in Russia. It was a calculated decision, and the family — including Rand — with the exception of the period from 1919 to 1921, when everyone in Russia had it bad — actually led a comfortable existence by Soviet standards of the early 1920’s. It was a decision with which Ayn Rand clearly did not agree, but this alone does not obviate the fact that Rand’s life in the Soviet Union was better and more privileged than the vast majority of its population at the time. For the record, she also was never a dissident and never ran into the sharp end of the Cheka. She may have despised them, but she never experienced their brutality personally.
The woman who would become known as Ayn Rand, was born Alyssa Rozenbaum in St. Petersburg in 1905. Her father was — according to some sources, including Rand herself, but by no means all — a wealthy pharmaceutical entrepreneur and, judging by his surname, and the fact that he lived and prospered outside the Pale of Settlement, a “cross-out” (vykrest) — someone of Jewish background who strategically converted to Russian Orthodoxy in order to escape the restrictions to which the Tzarist regime subjected Jews. Her mother reportedly was a crass social climber, who made no secret of the fact that she married Rozenbaum for his money, and openly lamented to her friends that she could have done better.
Little Alyssa attended an exclusive private school for girls. When she was ten years old, a teacher assigned the class a theme, “What I like about being a child”. The next day, Alyssa handed in a ten-page scathing denunciation of childhood. For the record, this was before the Bolshevik Revolution.
After the Bolshevik Revolution, the Rozenbaums fled to Yalta, which was under the control of the White Army, and where Alyssa and her two younger sisters continued to attend school. However, unlike most people of their economic standing (if not social class — the Rozenbaums were still Jews in the eyes of the Russian aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, no matter how hard they celebrated Christmas), they did not proceed to flee to Istanbul and from there to a new home in Western Europe, South America or the United States. I wonder if the resentment that Alyssa surely felt from being in a social no-man’s land — a Russian Orthodox Christian officially, but one of Hebrew extraction, who experienced no technical, legal disabilities but was still treated as a social inferior by the Russians and as an apostate by Jews — was the true cause of her “atheism”, rather than a profound self-examination. I say that simply because so much of what Ayn Rand believed seemed to be motivated by naked revanchism.
In any event, the Rozenbaum family could have emigrated … but didn’t. Instead, they returned to their native city, now patriotically/xenophobically renamed Petrograd. Most of what we know about this period of Ayn Rand’s life comes from Rand herself. Life was hard, which is something I believe, because Rozenbaum’s business had been confiscated, and the economy was a wreck. However, the misery that Russia endured during the period from 1919 to roughly 1921 was universal, and can hardly be blamed entirely on the Bolsheviks. The country had just emerged from its participation in World War I, which had plunged it into a deep recession and exhausted it both economically and in terms of the human cost. It was, following the Bolshevik Revolution, in the midst of a devastating civil war, in which the White Army, supported by foreign troops, attempted to retake power for the Tzar.
But, as the country emerged from this nightmare, the Rozenbaums … were doing okay, actually. They were living in Petrograd, apparently not afraid of persecution. Alyssa enrolled in Petrograd University, which was then the country’s most selective institution of higher learning. This, despite the fact that her high-bourgeois background should have disqualified her. Ironically, had it not been for the Revolution, Alyssa would not have been able to attend the university either: the Russian academia under the old regime utterly excluded women. It excluded women so hard, girls could not even audit courses in universities, never mind pursue degrees.
According to Rand, she and a bunch of other students were, in fact, expelled for being “bourgeois” a month before graduation, but then complaints by some “visiting foreign scientists” shamed the government into re-enrolling them, and she was able to graduate. This probably has a grain of truth in it, but on the whole, it sounds preposterous. Foreign luminaries sometimes — sometimes —succeeded in shaming the Soviet government into stopping persecution of people who were intellectual celebrities and well-known abroad. However, the idea of some random “foreign scientists” successfully pressuring the GPU (KGB forerunner) into leaning on the university to re-enroll a bunch of unknowns who weren’t even in science programs to begin with, does not sound credible to me. Nor does it sound credible that Alyssa and her friends so deeply impressed “some foreign scientists” with their intellectual conversation that said foreign scientists proceeded to get all up in the face of the GPU. It is indeed surprising that Alyssa was allowed to attend the country’s flagship university given her background, but this suggests far more strongly that her father informed for the GPU and its predecessor, the Cheka; and very likely Alyssa herself. (I am a former Soviet myself. My grandparents and their siblings lived through the same period of time as Ayn Rand, in the same places. One — indeed, the only — way to circumvent the Soviet regime’s discrimination against the former bourgeoisie was to become a snitch.) It also explains why the Bolshevik government apparently left the family in peace, and why Rand was able to obtain an exit passport and emigrate to the United States without triggering catastrophic consequences for her parents and sisters.
Incidentally, if you don’t know this already, do you want to take a wild guess what Ayn Rand majored in? If you guessed “philosophy”, God bless you, ye gullible creature, but no, sorry, no prize this time. She majored in social pedagogy. It was a new study track whose purpose was to pump out young ideological functionaries who would then create and operate a system for indoctrinating the older and more ossified Russian public in the new ideology and political culture.
As a former Soviet, who grew up when the wild immediate post-Revolutionary and Stalinist years were still within living memory, there is something that I find extremely exasperating when discussing Ayn Rand with Americans. Her fans in this country see no conflict between the facts that, on the one hand, she attended the most selective university in the early Soviet Union, was enrolled in a program for shaping ideological propagandists, and was able to publish an article; and, on the other hand, that she suffered brutal repression at the hands of the Bolshevik government. Those two things cannot, in fact, both be true, but alas, people living here have no idea what totalitarianism is actually like. In reality, the Bolsheviks quickly established a cast-iron death grip over the intelligentsia, particularly over who got to be in it. No way in HELL would this government have permitted a student to enroll in the social pedagogy track of Petrograd University unless she was thoroughly vetted, and those at the levers of power found her ideologically reliable. And someone of Ayn Rand’s background would have to bend over backwards to prove her reliability and ideological orthodoxy. This, more than anything else, tells me that Rand had an accommodation with the new regime, the regime which she would later claim was so odious to her.
Same thing with that Pola Negri profile Ayn Rand had published while still living in Soviet Russia.
The government absolutely controlled all publications. Everything was subject to thorough censorship. And, the regime totally controlled whose blatherings got to be published, particularly when it came to new authors who weren’t already known. Again, no way in hell would this regime allow the publication of anything by some young whipper-snapper from a bourgeois background unless its ideological police was certain the author would be a reliable, loyal propagandist. These restrictions would apply even to something as insignificant as a puff piece on Pola Negri. The fact that Ayn Rand’s profile of Negri got published once again demonstrates she was far more comfortably integrated into the Bolshevik regime than she would later let on.
I should mention as a side note that the only source for almost everything we know about Ayn Rand’s life before her immigration to the United States is Ayn Rand herself. Or, at least, the English-language sources are limited to Rand’s own claims and reminiscences. So how much weight to give these claims depends on how far you trust Ayn Rand to be truthful about herself and her antecedents. For instance, the fact that she wrote and published an article about Pola Negri while still in the USSR is easily verified. Her claim that she wrote a play at the age of eight, and her first novel at the age of ten? Not so much.
Was she really a St. Petersburg native? (That I believe. Her whole obnoxious, condescending, superior, more-intellectual-than-thou schtick was classically St. Peterburgian. Yes, I’m partly joking, and as a Moscow native, I just couldn’t resist; but, as the Russian saying goes, there is a bit of a joke in every joke.)
Was her father really a wealthy entrepreneur who had all his property confiscated by the Bolsheviks? English-language sources (based on Rand’s claims) all say so. But Russian-language sources reveal that Rand’s father was actually a drugstore manager — a salaried employee — but that he himself did not own any drugstores. He worked for a pharmacy owned by his brother-in-law. According to Russian-language sources, the Rozenbaum family was well-to-do and lived very comfortably, but it wasn’t nearly as rich as Ayn Rand would later claim, her father wasn’t an entrepreneur, and he owed what prosperity he had to corporate nepotism. The Rozenbaums — again, according to Russian sources — lived in a spacious (by standards of the time) apartment above the drug store in which Ayn Rand’s father worked. Another apartment in the building was occupied by Ayn Rand’s uncle-by-marriage, who also owned the drug store, so it’s a safe bet the uncle also owned the apartment in which Ayn Rand’s family lived. Dad had a good gig, but it seems dubious he had much in the way of property for the Bolsheviks to confiscate. As to the uncle’s fate, he disappeared from history after the Revolution, which I take to mean he took everything he could carry away and wisely skedaddled.
So I guess the most essential brutal truth about Ayn Rand was that she was willing to bend the truth, and sometimes probably to outright lie, to promote herself. And she possibly has done far worse, though this is admittedly speculation on my part based on some circumstantial stuff.
The brutal truth about Ayn Rand is that she became a teacher of evil. She wrote from an early age, so we have a pretty good idea of where she stood on various issues in her early twenties, no less than in her sixties. Her personality shows no evolution — a telling sign of the vacuity of her “philosophies”. From an early age, she admired serial killers, rapists and others who showed brutality to “the weak”, and despised the softer side of humanity, such as empathy, generosity or familial bonds. I would submit that the only reason she didn’t become a Nazi is that her Jewish background disqualified her. But apart from that, she was a fascist through and through.
As a writer, she was only successful because she wrote right-wing porn. Her writing is wordy, stiff and pompous. Her dialogue is wooden, her characters two-dimensional, and her stories boring. She also engaged in name-dropping. Her knowledge of Western philosophers was superficial, and she did not understand them, whether she criticized or purported to embrace their views. She was a moralist — not a philosopher. A moralist, and an immoral one at that.
She also clearly didn’t understand how the world works, or else she substituted her own wishful thinking for reality. She didn’t understand, for instance, the process of technological innovation. In her works, a tiny group of entrepreneurs know how to do all the things, which of course begs the question why they even have employees. But most of the world does not understand their inventions, or how to make their products. John Galt has invented a magic alloy, and he is literally the only one who knows how to make it. When he flounces, his entire industry craters, because literally no one else in the world knows how to make this magic alloy or understands the scientific writings he left behind.
This is, of course, horse****. The magic of science is done by teams of people, and depends heavily on the transfer, sharing and accumulation of knowledge. In the real world, the departure of an executive never leads to a company immediately collapsing. Apple continued to make iPhones even after Steve Jobs left; hell, even after he died. The idea that a handful of brilliant billionaires literally keep the civilization going is insane. And deeply, deeply stupid.
So these billionaires leave civilization and secret themselves in some very secluded locale. No one can find them, because, of course, now that they are gone, no one knows how to fly planes, read maps, analyze legal documents, monitor radio signals and so forth. Somehow these titans of industry are entirely self-sufficient in their “gulch” and never need to import anything from the outside. Perhaps therein Galt invented some magic farming and manufacturing methods which allowed these people to produce all the food, tools and goods they needed without getting their hands dirty, and still left them enough time to pontificate. In the absence of the hoi-polloi, who built their houses? Who cleaned them? Who cooked their food? Who babysat their children? Who treated their cancers? Who weaved their cloth and made their schmattehs? Probably they invented a magic solution to all of humanity’s needs, but humanity is not worthy of the knowledge.
The notion of Galt’s Gulch is laughable, except for how truly depressing it is to see so many supposedly smart people take it seriously.
The brutal truth about Ayn Rand was that she was an angry, obnoxious little snit, who invented an absolutely bizarre vision of how a civilized society should function and who appealed to the worst in people by extolling qualities that have been considered vices across history.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See
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