Food Inflation Hits Record High, getting harder to put any kind of meat on the table
A product of excessive government spending
Putting food on the kitchen table has become much more expensive, squeezing household budgets at a time when many families are already stressed by the Delta variant surge hitting as kids go back to school.
Food prices rose a full percentage point in August, up from six-tenths of a point in July, defying predictions that inflation would cool off, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed Friday. Compared with a year ago, food prices are up 12.7 percent, outpacing the overall increase of 8.3 percent in the Producer Price Index.
On an annual basis, that is the highest level of food inflation in records that go back to 2010. The monthly figure is the third-highest on record, following May 2020’s pantry-raid that emptied many grocery store shelves and February 2011.
Prices of some staples have been driven sky-high. Some of the truly startling annual numbers from Friday’s Producer Price Index:
Beef and Veal: +59.2 percent
Pork: +34.1 percent
Chickens: +32 percent
Fish: +18 percent
Turkey: +41.4 percent
Fresh eggs: +31.7 percent
Shortening and cooking oils are up a jaw dropping 43.5 percent.
Not all food prices are up, of course. Dairy prices are down. Fresh fruits and vegetable prices have fallen (although canned fruits and vegetable prices are up).
Grain prices are up an incredible 98 percent, although that largely reflects the plunge in global demand last year combined with a surge this year.
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Chatting With Larry Elder: The Mystery of California
Roger L. Simon
I motored up to Larry Elder's house for an interview that turned out not to be an interview, at least not in the conventional sense.
It had been scheduled for a couple of days and I had plenty of time to think of some questions, even had jotted a few down, but never asked them.
Elder was just getting off a Zoom press conference when I arrived and we just started talking, no notes, no recording, until he had to go off to yet another conference in his quest to upend Gavin Newsom and become governor of California.
And I'm pretty sure it was better that way, because Larry Elder's stances on the issues are more well known than just about any political candidate I can think of. He's been talking about them on air for roughly quarter of a century, often in far greater detail than you ever get from elected officials.
Also, as he was no doubt aware-we have known each other for some time-I pretty much agree with all of them. So I'm the last person to have asked him probing questions.
So we talked.
And the substance was this: How, given the atrocious condition of the state of California and the city of Los Angeles, where I lived for fifty years and he still does, would any sane person not want to try to a new approach to government and a new governor?
Call it the mystery of California. How did the most beautiful piece of real estate arguably in the entire globe turn into-let's be blunt-a rubbish heap?
I had just seen it up close and personal. Driving up to Elder's house, I had taken a familiar route up Cahuenga Boulevard into the hills, only Cahuenga was no longer the Cahuenga I had known.
Once the vibrant heart of LA's, even the world's, entertainment district, it resembled what you would imagine the back streets in an impoverished neighborhood of Calcutta might look like (with apologies to Calcutta because I have never been there).
The homeless, aka the "untouchables" as they would say in India, were everywhere, interspersed with angry, amphetamine-crazed kids on skateboards flying against traffic, daring you to collide with them, like a scene out of some dystopian horror flick.
It was the kind of place you didn't want to make eye contact with anybody.
Couple this with the Barrio and South Central remaining what they always were, and you would think it's time for a change.
I asked Elder if he had detected any change, particularly in the black community. For years he has been called an "Uncle Tom," "Oreo Cookie," and so forth for daring to swim against the conventional tide of what's called "liberalism" in our society. He made an award-winning documentary on the subject.
Elder said that in the last year or so he had noticed some change, but there was still a distance to go, even in the black religious community where you would hope for more responsiveness to a new approach.
Unfortunately, in a recent campaign discussion, he had spoken with a group of black pastors about his view that systemic racism did not exist, how the idea was actually destructive to black people, and got back endless talk of George Floyd and how the police discriminated against people of color, despite the data showing the reverse is true.
Whites have considerably more to fear from the police than blacks, as has been extensively documented by Heather Mac Donald among others, but these pastors didn't want to hear about it. And of course they didn't want to hear about black on black crime or the decline of the black family or the other issues Elder has been talking about so eloquently over the years.
They were wedded to a delusion just as white so-called elites are wedded to similar delusions, making California, a land where the rich live like gods while pretending they are helping the downtrodden by mouthing "woke" rhetoric and voting Democratic as a replacement for religion.
I have been told by locals that eventually you just ignore the mayhem around you while returning to your manse on the hill or the beach.
Meanwhile, democracy is dying in ignorance. Whether that ignorance can be overcome is what's at stake in the California recall election. Elder is working hard to overcome that ignorance in a state that is really a country of its own with the fifth biggest economy in the world.
And he's clearly not alone. Despite the above mentioned pastors-who-see-no-evil, or at least no evil beyond what they have had drilled into their heads by left/liberal media, people across this state are waking up and Elder's popularity is great-whether great enough we shall see.
The Clockwork Orange-like atmosphere I witnessed in Hollywood is clearly disturbing a lot of people. Not everyone can afford private security like the Newsoms and Pelosis of the world. Few can.
And matters are made considerably worse because of the "left of Trotsky" district attorneys in Los Angeles and San Francisco who make the clich‚ "soft on crime" an understatement of monumental dimensions.
So it's no accident Elder is holding frequent press conferences highlighting what only can be called a crime wave in the state, today's featuring a woman named Carla Pearson, whose stepson was killed by drunk driver, who was paroled by Gavin Newsom's parole board.
Yesterday's had Tania Owen beside him, a retired Los Angeles Sheriff's Department detective and widow of Sgt. Steve Owen (shot by a gunman in 2016), now head of the Recall George Gascon campaign. (For those who don't know, Gascon is the LA DA who seems to have some kind of affection for violent criminals.)
Yes, Newsom's isn't the only California recall campaign.
And, yes, California is a mystery-how all this came to pass. It's the mystery of democracy. Can it work if the public doesn't pay attention-or if they're consistently lied to?
The Elder campaign may give us an answer, and hopefully a positive one.
It's been interesting here, to say the least, but I'm returning to Nashville Friday and I can't say reluctantly. I didn't leave my heart in San Francisco. I didn't even go there. That would have been too much.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_morningbrief/chatting-with-larry-elder-the-mystery-of-california_3979355.html ?
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Google has launched 'racial equity training' for employees
Documents from the training sessions have purportedly been leaked by disgruntled employees
Google has launched 'racial equity training' for its employees, with one session asserting that America is based on a 'system of white supremacy' where babies learn to be racist at three months old.
Whistleblower documents from the trainings obtained by City Journal reporter Christopher Rufo were published Wednesday, with the sessions seemingly based on the core principles of Critical Race Theory.
Several of the trainings feature CRT buzzwords and phrases such as 'equity' 'intersectionality,' 'white privilege,' and 'systemic racism'.
The training features a number of videos from guest lecturers, including Ibram X. Kendi, who penned the controversial bestseller How To Be An Antiracist .
In his training clip, Kendi states: 'To be raised in the United States, is to be raised to be racist, and to be raised to be racist is to be raised to almost be addicted to racist ideas.'
He adds: 'The youngest of people are not colorblind - between three and six months, our toddlers are beginning to understand race and see race.'
A separate video session features Nikole Hannah-Jones, a New York Times journalist best known as the editor of the '1619 Project', which retells the founding of America through the eyes of slaves, but has been criticized over multiple inaccuracies. 'If you name anything in America, I can relate it back to slavery,' Hannah-Jones says in her clip for the Google training.
'The first Africans being sold [in 1619] is more foundational to the American story' than 'the Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock', she goes on to state in the video, according to Rufo.
Meanwhile, another training module, titled 'Allyship in Action,' asks employees to 'identify their privileged identities' and rank themselves on a hierarchy.
One diagram - which was purportedly given to Rufo by a disgruntled Google employee - is titled 'Wheel of Power/ Privilege'. One slice of the wheel asserts that 'gay men' have more privilege and power than 'lesbian, bi, pansexual and asexual people'.
There are also a number of unofficial documents purportedly circulating amongst Google staff.
According to Rufo, one Google DEI Lead has created an internal document titled 'Anti-racism resources', which contains readings and 'racial-consciousness exercises'.
The document includes a graphic which lists covert or 'socially acceptable' forms of white supremacy. According to the list, the phrase 'Make America Great Again' is a form of covert white supremacy.
Others forms of covert white supremacy include 'white silence', 'denial of white privilege', 'colorblindness', 'paternalism', 'tokenism' and the 'meritocracy myth'.
A separate graphic in the resource package is titled 'The White Supremacy Pyramid'. It features conservative commentator Ben Shapiro at the base of the pyramid, before working upwards to other figures who are deemed more insidious.
Donald Trump features partway up the pyramid, while the apex features photos of white mass murderers including Norwegian killer Anders Brevik.
Rufo claims the graphic 'advances the idea that Ben Shapiro is a foundation of 'white supremacy' and that Donald Trump is moving society on a path toward 'mass murder' and 'genocide.'
The 'racial equity trainings' were announced by Google CEO Sundar Pichai last year in the wake of George Floyd's murder.
'We'll be welcoming external experts into Google to share their expertise on racial history and structural inequities, and start conversations on education, allyship, and self-reflection,' Pichai wrote.
'We plan to roll out this training globally by early next year. We'll also integrate diversity, equity, and inclusion into our mandatory manager trainings,' he added.
Rufo - who been working to expose alleged 'critical race theory indoctrination' in American companies and institutions - told Fox News he is alarmed by Google's trainings.
'What we see inside these companies is that increasingly, the ideology of Google employees is actively hostile to the United States and other documents say that the United States is a system of white supremacy and that everyone in this country is 'raised to be racist,' he stated.
'This is a deeply false and damaging kind of thinking. It should have nowhere in America's biggest and most powerful companies'.
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9/11: Four faces of failure
In the 9/11 coverage, the press is making a big deal about all the wonderful (read: post-Trump) presidential unity. Here's CBS's story and that's just one example:
Three presidents and their wives stood somberly side by side at the National September 11 Memorial, sharing a moment of silence to mark the anniversary of the nation's worst terror attack with a display of unity.
President Joe Biden and former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton all gathered at the site where the World Trade Center towers fell two decades ago. They each wore blue ribbons and held their hands over their hearts as a procession marched a flag through the memorial, watched by hundreds of Americans gathered for the remembrance, some carrying photos of loved ones lost in the attacks.
It all looked very nice as if something was being sold to the public. Unity? Isn't that what Joe Biden talks about? The show of presidential force from just Democrats and their one Republican ally isn't quite unity unless President Trump never happened. Trump, in fact, the only New York native, was attending his own events with first responders.
To the ordinary observer, the "presidential unity" was actually the four faces of failure. It was a reminder to the public of how many presidents had failed us.
Afghanistan was a disastrous war that ran for 20 long years in the wake of 9/11 and the presidential failures there were emblematic in that lineup.
Bill Clinton, who occupied the first slot, was the sorry president who turned down the golden opportunity to destroy Osama bin Laden who'd launched a string of pre9/11 terrorist attacks when Sudan offered it to him on a platter.
George Bush, who came after, was also pretty wretched. Rather than just blow the hell out of the terrorists in their nests, he turned his whole project into a nation-building operation, which ended up being a lot of consultant contracts. Worse still, he failed to learn the lessons of post-World War II as long as he was big on national building. Were property rights and personal security placed first, as Gen. Douglas MacArthur had done? No, they weren't. It was all about the Afghanistan girls, and wokester education, bolstering the blue-city dynamic at the expense of the countryside.
This disturbing, haunting, and likely true long story by Anand Gopal at the New Yorker pretty well lays out the entire failure of the Bush nation-building project. Back home, Bush gave us the nationalized TSA, making blue-haired grannies open to frisking as if maladjusted Middle Eastern military-aged young men weren't the actual terrorism perpetrators.
Then there was Barack Obama, who extended the legal handcuffs on our troops he sent to Afghanistan to fight. He gave the order to get bin Laden but he ruined the victory by giving bin Laden a proper Muslim burial as if this monster were some kind of good Muslim who deserved one, and after that allowed no pictures of his sorry rotten carcass to demoralize the enemy as if he wanted no terrorist feelings hurt. Worse still, he traded five top Taliban leaders imprisoned at Gitmo for the sorry U.S. deserter, Bowe Bergdahl, complete with a bizarre White House ceremony. Today those savages rule Afghanistan, in powerful positions such as intelligence. Failure? That's putting it politely
But none could top the kingpin of failure, miserable Joe Biden, the man who alone opposed the 2011 killing of bin Laden. After that, as president, he then delivered the Afghanistan pullout fiasco, the worst foreign policy disaster in American history. He failed to plan for the inevitable in setting up the pullout, he focused on giving the enemy a symbolic 9/11 date and they took advantage. When disaster came, he hid in his basement for most of the horrible news footage. When he came out it was to blame his predecessor and claim himself the hero. He stiffed America's allies, longtime Britain and the Afghani military at Bagram Airfield, pulling out without notice and refusing to take their phone calls.
He hauled in tens of thousands of unvetted Afghans who managed to push and shove their way onto departing American planes to the states while leaving Americans and Afghani translators behind. Some 44 unvetted Afghanis who were brought to the U.S. without papers have been found to have terrorist ties at last count and Biden doesn't know what to do about them. His failures were the apex and cascade of all failures that could come of his pullout. Our enemies are licking their chops now, with China coolly eyeing Bagram.
Unity? An aw-shucks wonderful presidential picture? No, just failure, failure in so many different forms. Frankly, I couldn't stand to look at the picture.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/09/911_four_faces_of_failure.html
****************************************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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