Inflation nation: US consumer prices surge to 40-year high
This is an outrageous attack on the savings and incomes of the average American. It means that your greenbacks are devalued. They buy less. And that loss can not be made up. It is permanent. Raiding people's savings in particular is completely reprehensible. And its cause is a government that issues new money to finance its spending rather than raising taxes to cover the expenditure
If you’ve noticed your dollars don’t seem to have the same purchasing punch as they did a year ago, there’s a very good reason for that.
Consumer price inflation in the United States rose at an annual rate of 7.5 percent in January, the Bureau of Labor Statics said on Thursday. That is the fastest pace since July 1982.
On a monthly basis, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) – which measures price changes in a basket of goods and services – increased 0.6 percent in January compared with the previous month.
Surging prices for groceries, electricity, and rent led the charge higher, with the food index rising 0.9 percent in January, after increasing 0.5 percent in December.
The energy index also rose 0.9 percent in January compared with the previous month, as soaring electricity prices were partially offset by falling prices for gasoline and natural gas.
The so-called “core” index, which strips out volatile food and energy, rose 0.6 percent in January – the same rise as December.
January marked the seventh time in the past 10 months that the core index rose at least 0.5 percent.
Inflation is placing an increasingly onerous burden on American households but is especially tough on low-income ones because it eats up a larger share of their financial resources.
Economists over at Moody’s Analytics estimate that annual inflation is costing the average US household $250 a month based on December’s CPI figures. Americans aged 35 to 54 are spending $303 – $305 more a month, according to Moody’s, while pensioners aged 65 and older, are spending $194 a month.
To place that burden and the financial fragility it feeds into perspective – some 36 percent of Americans do not have enough cash or cash its equivalent to cover a $400 emergency expense, such as a car repair or medical bill, according to the US Federal Reserve.
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What the Canadian Truckers Want
In a word Freedom: Freedom from an oppressive Leftist government. Vaccine mandates are being discontinued worldwide but not in Canada under Pretty Boy Trudeau
For two weeks, the 18-wheelers, the semis, the tractors and the pick-up trucks streamed through the snow and ice into the center of Ottawa, the Canadian capital.
They came from across the country. Vaxxed, unvaxxed, white, black, Chinese, Sikh, Indian, alone or with their wives and kids. They huddled around campfires. They set up pop-up kitchens and tents with block captains doling out coffee and blankets. They honked (and honked and honked). They blasted “We Are the World.” And everywhere you looked, someone was waving the Maple Leaf.
It dipped to 4 degrees. The mayor declared a state of emergency. And they didn’t budge.
The truckers were scared of running out of gas—freezing to death in their little truck beds in the middle of the night. The city threatened to arrest anyone who brought it to them. In response, hundreds of Ottawans did just that. The truckers stayed put.
They are a city inside a city whose inhabitants—there are an estimated 8,000 to 10,000—were outraged with a country that seemed to have forgotten they existed. This past Sunday, as if to confirm that suspicion, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who has yet to meet with Freedom Convoy leaders, took a personal day. On Monday, during an emergency debate at the House of Commons, he called them “a few people shouting and waving swastikas.”
I live in downtown Ottawa, within view of Parliament Hill, and have spent the past 10 days or so bundled up and walking around the protests. I have spoken to close to 100 protesters, truckers and other folks, and not one of them sounded like an insurrectionist, white supremacist, racist or misogynist.
Katie Hepburn from Owen Sound, Ontario. (Dan Aponte)
They sound like Ivan, 46, who emigrated, with his wife, Tatiana, from Ukraine to build a new life in New Brunswick, in eastern Canada. "We came to Canada to be free—not slaves,” he said. “We lived under communism, and, in Canada, we’re now fighting for our freedom.” (Like so many truckers, Ivan refused to share his last name.)
B.J. Dichter, a spokesman for the Freedom Convoy, is vaccinated, and he estimates that many—maybe most—of the truckers at the protest are, too. “I’m Jewish. I have family in mass graves in Europe. And apparently I’m a white supremacist,” he told me on Wednesday.
Ostensibly, the truckers are against a new rule mandating that, when they re-enter Canada from the United States, they have to be vaccinated. But that’s not really it. The mandate is a moot point: The Americans have a similar requirement, and, anyway, “the vast majority” of Canadian truckers, according to the Canadian Trucking Alliance, are vaccinated. (The CTA represents about 4,500 truckers nationwide.)
So it’s about something else. Or many things: a sense that things will never go back to normal, a sense that they are being ganged up on by the government, the media, Big Tech, Big Pharma.
One thing was indisputable: There was this electricity coursing through the streets, and it felt like it could get out of control. It didn’t help when a handful of protesters sported swastikas and Confederate flags. Or when GoFundMe shut down the convoy’s fundraiser, announcing that donors had two weeks to reclaim their money before it was sent to “established charities” chosen by Freedom Convoy organizers. Or when the cops started arresting locals, including the elderly.
It is hard to capture how thoroughly Trudeau has misjudged the moment. “This pandemic has sucked for all Canadians,” he said Monday. As for the protest? “It has to stop,” declared the prime minister.
If he sauntered down to the mess of rigs on Wellington Street, across from the Parliament building, opposite the mall and the war memorial, if he talked to these people for a few minutes, he would understand: It will not stop.
What’s happening in Canada right now is bigger than the mandates.
The convoy is spearheaded by truckers, but its message of opposition to life under government control has brought onto the icy streets countless, once-voiceless people declaring that they are done being ignored. That the elites—the people who have Zoomed their way through the pandemic—had better start paying attention to the fentanyl overdoses, the suicides, the crime, the despair. Or else.
Kamal Pannu, 33, is a Sikh immigrant and trucker from Montreal. He doesn’t believe in vaccinations; he believes in natural immunity. He had joined the convoy because the Covid restrictions in the surrounding province of Quebec had become too much to bear. He said that he and his wife used to do their grocery shopping at Costco, until the government decreed that the unvaxxed would be barred from big-box stores. Since then, their monthly grocery bill had jumped by $200. “Before,” he said, “we didn’t look at the price of what we were buying. Now, we sometimes put items back because we don’t have that much money.”
Peter, 28, a long-haul trucker from Ontario, told me that a divide had opened up all across the country. Pointing to the gleaming, ritzy condominiums near Parliament, he said he used to deliver the concrete stairs in those buildings. Since the cross-border vaccine mandate kicked in in mid-January, he’s been out of work. He refused to get vaccinated, he said, because the whole thing had been so politicized, and you couldn’t be sure who to trust. He refused to give his last name, he said, because he didn’t want the government coming after him, and he wanted to work again.
I heard this over and over from the truckers. And it was not entirely crazy. The CTA, which has publicly criticized the Freedom Convoy, said in a January 29 statement addressed to the truckers in Ottawa: “Your behavior today will not only reflect upon you and your family but the 300,000 plus fellow Canadians that, like you, take great pride in our industry.”
If you pointed out to people like Peter—and I did—that almost every doctor in the country had been vaccinated, it didn’t matter. There was bodily autonomy. And privacy. And religious exemptions. And anyway, how could you know what the doctors were thinking? You couldn’t trust the press or politicians, he said, recalling that in the fall of 2020, then vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris expressed skepticism of any vaccine approved under President Donald Trump. Now, they were being ordered to get this vaccine developed . . . under President Donald Trump.
“If you’re not vaccinated,” Peter said, “they treat you like garbage lying on the streets.”
Theo, 24, felt the same way. He wasn’t a trucker—he used to work at a major accounting firm and now works another big company—but he was angry, like the truckers were. “They treated me like a second-class citizen,” he said, referring to his old firm. He explained that he’d refused to get vaccinated. He’d been vaccinated for other things. But he had a hereditary heart condition that, he said, made the Covid vaccine inadvisable—but he couldn’t get a medical exemption. At work, they made him mask up constantly. He felt like he was being publicly shamed. So, he quit.
Theo’s brother, Lucas, who’s 21, is also unvaccinated for similar reasons. He’d planned to go to law school, but, being unvaccinated, he had to take only online courses, but some of the courses he’d need to graduate were only available in person. Now, his future was uncertain.
A lot of the truckers who had driven in from Vancouver and Winnipeg and Quebec City expressed this same uncertainty. It was getting really expensive to get by: rent, utilities, groceries, everything. Almost everyone who was poor or even middle-class was mired in debt. They told me that they expected this sort of wealth gap in America, but not in Canada.
The divide that already existed between the haves and have-nots largely mapped onto the new chasm between those who supported the mandates and those who did not. And that was creating this huge, weird fracturing everywhere.
Mackenzie, 24, from Ottawa, works as a bartender at a popular downtown restaurant near Parliament. She had Covid, got better, and believes it’s her choice not to get the vaccine. She isn’t an anti-vaxxer. She’s been vaccinated for other things. But Covid wasn’t the same as malaria or the flu. And there were European countries, like Germany and Switzerland, that recognized recovery from infection as an alternative to vaccination. Canada, like the United States, does not.
It was ironic, she said that she could serve but couldn’t dine at the restaurant where she worked. She’d lost a close friend over her vaccination status. When I asked her why she wouldn’t tell me her last name, she said she didn’t want to upset her parents. “Not many people know this side of me,” she said.
Chris, a 40-year-old trucker from Toronto, said that he’d gotten vaccinated so he could keep his job, but that his participation in the protest had torn his family apart. “My father has spat in my face and disowned me as his son. Told me I’m not worth the family name because I will not vaccinate my children,” he said. “My mom and I have battled back and forth.”
Matt Sim, 43, who immigrated to Canada from South Korea, is director of operations of an IT start-up in Toronto and came to Ottawa with his wife to join the protests. He’d had Covid, and then he’d recovered, and he was skeptical of all the hysteria surrounding the vaccines. His family, back home in Korea, had lived through the Asian financial crisis of 1997, and that had made him skeptical of the media, the government, and powerful people in general. “There’s a group in power that always manages to create panic among the masses and siphon off public funds,” Sim said.
The Freedom Convoy came as a surprise. Unlike the United States, Canada had never seen mass protests and civil disobedience on this scale.
And it is not dying down. Since Monday, truckers have blocked the main route linking Windsor, Ontario, and Detroit, Michigan—a route that some 8,000 trucks use each day and accounts for 25 percent of trade between the two countries.
The protesters feel the mood shifting. On Tuesday, the premier of Saskatchewan, Scott Moe, announced the end of his province’s proof-of-vaccination policy. “It is time for us also to heal the divisions in our communities over vaccination,” he said.
Joël Lightbound, a leading member of Parliament from Quebec and a member of the Liberal Party, Trudeau’s party, slammed the federal government. The government, Lightbound said, had gone “from a more positive approach to one that stigmatizes and divides people.” The truckers say they won’t leave Ottawa until the mandates, the lockdowns—everything—are dropped.
There was a new consciousness, too, a feeling among the truckers that they weren’t as alone as they’d thought. Blake, a contractor who had driven in his pickup to Ottawa from his home in Toronto, called the protest a “diesel-fueled hippie commune.” We met one night, very late, in the freezing cold, while Blake, in beige overalls, danced with 50 other protesters on a makeshift dance floor. There was a D.J. playing Gloria Estefan’s “Conga.”
The solidarity was infectious. There were copycat protests popping up in Helsinki, Finland, and Wellington, New Zealand and Nice, France (they planned to hit Paris and Brussels). There were truckers organizing in the Netherlands, Australia and the United States. Among the Americans who had driven up to Ottawa there was talk that soon the big rigs would descend on Washington, D.C.
“Seeing the country fall apart like this is heartbreaking,” Sim said. “For me, this is the line in the sand. If we lose this battle, I’d like to move out of Canada.” He said that he was thinking of maybe heading to Florida. A lot of the truckers were thinking about the States. But not yet. “I feel that I owe it to me and others that share my values to, at least, fight for this.”
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/what-the-truckers-want
*******************************************An Obama photograph proves the lies of 'climate change' and COVID
The left is built upon a mountain of falsehoods. Two of the biggest are that humankind is trembling on the brink of destruction because of "climate change" and that onerous COVID restrictions are the only things keeping us alive. So what are we to make of an unmasked Obama standing around construction workers, very grumpy about work on his multimillion-dollar beachfront Hawaiian mansion? What I make of it is that both "climate change" and COVID restrictions are huge parts of that mountain of lies.
Here's the picture that is a microcosm of all the lies:
Heck, going back farther, that first beachfront purchase was even more peculiar when you consider the speech Obama gave when accepting the Democrat party nomination in 2008:
This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.
While the rise of the oceans may not have slowed for those of us suffering through the horrors of the green movement (vastly increased energy prices, inconvenient and expensive electric cars, low-flow showers, and more), they certainly seem to have slowed for Obama. Indeed, they've slowed so much that he's confident buying beachfront property on an island. I don't know about you, but I would think islands would be even more affected by "climate change" than a whole big continent.
Then there's the COVID mask narrative. Across America, parents are waging heroic battles to get masks off their children's faces. One of the major weapons in that battle is pictures of celebrities flouting those same mask rules. (Local politicians, teachers, and school board members tend to do the same.)
With the Obama picture, we have the perfect example of how the rich, famous, and political flout the rules. It's not just that they don't wear masks. It's that they expect the little people around them to wear masks. The reason for this double-standard is obvious: these self-styled "elite" aren’t afraid of the virus; they're disgusted by you. Just think back to the Met Gala, when all the famous people waltzed around unmasked while the help scurried by wearing masks.
Or how about this picture of Stacey Abrams protected from all those nasty, ordinary, germy little children, who, unlike overweight adults, are at almost no risk from COVID?
Not The Bee has a collection of a few other "masks are for the little people" moments.
Obama knows that the oceans won't rise in any significant way over the next decades or even centuries, just as he knows he's not at serious risk of dying from COVID. (I imagine that, should he catch it, he'll have special flights sent his way filled with monoclonal antibodies or ivermectin.) Obama, though, knows something more important than the truth: he knows that he and his party will keep complete control over America if Americans remain terrified of the all-purpose "climate change" narrative and of COVID.
In other words, America, you're being played.
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The antivax movement is taking over the Right
Lee Haywood got the Covid-19 Vaccine. He’s seen friends lose their lives to the virus and watched others struggle to recover. A longtime smoker, he believes the medical evidence showing that the shot sharply reduces the chances of a severe infection. Yet on the frigid afternoon of Jan. 23, Haywood was near the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, standing among signs that read Vaccines kill and stop the Vaccine Holocaust.
“I’m against the forced vaccinations or forced wearing of these masks by these bureaucrats deep in the bowels of the government,” says Haywood, a 61-year-old Republican running for a North Carolina congressional seat. “These mandates just slap everybody in the face.”
Haywood’s presence at the “Defeat the Mandates” rally illustrated how the antivaccine movement is uniting groups across the right. Once a fringe cohort, it has repositioned itself as an opponent of mandates and government overreach. The distinction has attracted legions of new supporters by tapping into the anger, exhaustion, and frustration of millions of Americans as the pandemic drags on.
At the D.C. demonstration, right-wing conspiracy theorists and vaccine skeptics mingled with libertarians, critics of “Big Pharma,” and conservative politicians like Haywood. Clusters of teachers and nurses stood alongside firefighters and church groups. The yellow Gadsden flags adopted by the Tea Party more than a decade ago mixed with trump 2020 placards and stop the steal signs. Men wearing the insignia of the farright Proud Boys lingered on the edges of the crowd, near a group of women wearing flower crowns and snapping selfies with a mama Bears against mandates board.
For this motley cross section of the right, the issue has become a defining marker of political identity. “There’s no going back now,” says Addie Johnson, 43, who drove in from Virginia and says she has lost friends and family relationships in the past year over her anti vaccination stance. “You’re either with this movement or against it.”
The coordination in the days before the rally illustrated the reach of the anti mandate message. The event was promoted on Joe Rogan’s podcast, the most popular show on Spotify, as well as on former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast. Calls between organizers and attendees on the social audio app Clubhouse often stretched on for several hours. Supporters shared information on Facebook and Telegram, offered to pay for one another’s bus tickets to Washington, and swapped advice on which restaurants and hotels wouldn’t require proof of vaccination.
The growing U.S. antivaccine movement is part of a global effort. The Washington rally featured speakers from Israel and the U.K., who frequently referenced lockdown measures abroad. Photos and videos of the event were widely shared in large international antivaccine and farright Telegram groups. The D.C. demonstration was scheduled to coincide with global antivaccine protests organized by a far-right German group, under the banner “World Wide Rally for Freedom.” It was a reflection of how the opposition to mandates, like other right-wing movements, has crossed borders in recent years.
On stage, a host of antivaccine celebrities, from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to right-wing doctors promoting alternative COVID-19 treatments, compared U.S. vaccination policies to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Physicians in white coats falsely claimed that vaccines are “not working.”
The overarching goal is “to create a populist movement through the propagation of disinformation and to undermine well-respected American institutions,” says Nick Sawyer, an emergency-room physician who runs the group No License for Disinformation, which advocates for state medical boards to revoke the licenses of doctors who spread disinformation and prescribe unproven treatments. This “antiscience, anti government movement” is taking advantage of a fringe group of doctors’ medical credentials to amplify and legitimize a harmful agenda, Sawyer says.
The shadow of the Jan. 6,2021, protest—which culminated in the attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters—lingered over the “Defeat the Mandates” rally. “Unfortunately, many people who wanted to come were scared to join because of it being so close to Jan. 6,” says Kaitlin Derstine, who organized a bus to Washington from Pennsylvania, filled with nearly 50 people from a conservative parents’ group.
Rally organizers cast the event in the tradition of the civil rights movement, complete with peace signs and tambourines. Yet experts warn that the growth of the joint anti vaccine and anti mandate movements could also provide cover to darker forces. In the context of the Capitol riot and the rising number of threats leveled against public officials nationwide, the calls to action at the “Defeat the Mandates” rally included some disturbing warning notes.
Some of the speakers at the rally threatened the press. Others inveighed against Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, invoking the Nuremberg trials of leading Nazis. Leaning against a tree, a woman in a pink headband and sunglasses held a sign declaring in bold black and red letters: Shoot those who try to kidnap and vaccinate your child.
Organizers are trying to funnel the movement’s growing number of adherents toward the political process. They directed supporters to contact their members of Congress and local government officials. Each of the three dozen rallygoers who spoke to TIME said the issue would be their top priority when they next go to the polls.
Already, opposition to vaccine and mask mandates has become a purity test for Republican officials. Just 26% of Republicans say they consider vaccine mandates acceptable, according to a poll conducted by CNN in December, compared with 82% of Democrats. This partisan divide is evident in the vaccination data itself: unvaccinated adults are three times more likely to lean Republican than Democrat, according to an analysis last November by the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Last summer, nearly half of House Republicans refused to say whether they had been vaccinated when asked by CNN. In Georgia, neither of the Republican front runners for the U.S.
Senate nomination will say whether they received the vaccine. In January, a GOP city council member in New York City refused to disclose her vaccination status, even though doing so barred her from entering the chamber. The opposition to mask and vaccine mandates has become so powerful with many Republicans that some of the rallygoers expressed frustration toward Trump, who has acknowledged receiving his COVID-19 booster.
The movement’s “us vs. them” language has the potential to make it a powerful political force, says Renee Diresta, who leads research on anti vaccine disinformation at the Stanford Internet Observatory. Diresta predicts a push to sink candidates who don’t malign vaccine mandates in upcoming GOP primaries. “That is the strategy I think we’ll see in 2022,” she says. Meanwhile, by uniting under an anti mandate umbrella, those who are antivaccine or espouse extremist views may be able to evade moderation by social media platforms, Diresta says. “The ‘vaccines are tyrannical government overreach’ argument is still a permissible one that can be made, because [social media companies] don’t want to look like they’re putting their thumb on the scale of a political issue.”
Haywood, the Republican candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from North Carolina, says standing up against vaccine mandates will be a key part of his campaign platform. “It’s about taking a stand against the government,” he says. “They need to be routed out and brought to justice.”
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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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