… is inflation cleaning out your wallet. The Consumer Price Index for August was up 8.3 % over August, 2021. That was higher than the “expected” rate.
The CPI’s food index rose 11.4% in August, the worst year-over-year increase since Jimmy Carter was President. (The Gentle Reader may remember that I once optimistically hoped that the Xiden Administration would be Carter’s second term.)
And the Dow fell about 500 points after the worse-than-“expected” inflation report.
We need a president who’s fluent in at least one language.
—Buck Henry
(H/T, Ali Alexander) BREAKING: Mike Lindell is going to sue the United States Government and FBI under the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments.
Karine Jean-Pierre really said this—
Look, when you look at the data, the inflation data, we’re seeing more progress, bringing global inflation down in the U.S. economy, as I just stated moments ago. Overall, uh, prices have been essentially flat in our country these last two months. That is welcome news for American families.
OTOH, if you believe Nineteen Eighty-Four is an instruction manual rather than a warning, then arithmetic is subject to revision as required. Two plus two can be five or three or four or whatever The Party needs it to be.
My 401k and rollover IRA were unavailable for comment.
BTW, I almost posted this with an I’m Not Making This Up, You Know headline.
The New York Times reports that “experts” find Judge Cannon’s decision to appoint a special master to review the property taken from Mar-a-Largo by the FBI to be “deeply problematic.”
This tweet is typical of the reaction from Progressives.
Katyal was Acting Solicitor General during the Obama Administration, and yes, he’s that Neal Katyal.
NASA’s statement:
The launch director waived off today’s Artemis I launch attempt at approximately 11:17 a.m. EDT. Teams encountered a liquid hydrogen leak while loading the propellant into the core stage of the Space Launch System rocket. Multiple troubleshooting efforts to address the area of the leak by reseating a seal in the quick disconnect where liquid hydrogen is fed into the rocket did not fix the issue. Engineers are continuing to gather additional data.
Once again, Joe Xiden has threatened to use the regular forces of the U.S. military against citizens who might actively resist one or more of his unconstitutional or illegal acts. Speaking in Pennsylvania today, he called for a federal ban on so-called “assault weapons.” Of course, the Supreme Court has just reversed and remanded the appeals court decision upholding Maryland’s “assault weapons” ban, but that hasn’t dulled Xiden’s lust for unconstitutional federal legislation.
Xiden also said—
You can’t go out and buy an automatic weapon, you can’t go out and buy a cannon, and for those brave right wing Americans who say its all about keeping America independent and safe, if you want to fight against the country you need an F-15. You need something a little more than a gun.
There are so many false statements there. You can go out and buy and automatic weapon. It has to be one that’s in the current registry of such weapons (over 150,000 such weapons are registered), you have to pass a background check, and you have to pay for a $200 tax stamp, but you can buy one. It’s also legal to buy a cannon. The process is similar to buying a machine gun.
IIRC, the last time veteran’s took up arms against a government, it was a local government, and the trigger for that action was a stolen election. You can read about The Battle of Athens here.
And finally, Xiden might want to think about how ragtag group of peasants with small arms handled modern armies and air forces in Afghanistan during the last four decades.
Just the News is reporting that former Washington Field Office Special Agent in Charge Tim Thibault was escorted out of FBI headquarters on Friday.
There have been reports of whistleblower allegations that Thibault showed political bias in his handling of politically sensitive investigations. He is supposed to have hidden the partisan nature of evidence from FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland to secure their approval to open an investigation into former President Donald Trump. That investigation culminated in the FBI’s raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate earlier this month.
Uh, huh.
Gentle Reader, do you believe that Wray and Garland weren’t aware of the political sensitivity of a criminal investigation of former president?
Me neither.
BTW, Senator Grassley’s office confirms Thibault has been removed from his post and reassigned to an unspecified position.
UPDATE—The NY Post reports that Thibault has resigned from the FBI.
Hmmmm.
Well, that certainly clears the air!
(H/T, @ArronWorthing) The Washington Times is reporting that DHS Secretary Mayorkas has cancelled the charter of the Disinformation Governance Board based on a recommendation of his Homeland Security Advisory Council.
The report was led by Michael Chertoff, a former Homeland Security secretary in the Bush administration, and Jamie Gorelick, a former deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration. Suggesting the department might be straying too far from its mission, Mr. Chertoff said, “They don’t have a red pencil to correct everything in the world that’s not true.” That’s Oldspeak for “idea doubleplusungood rewrite fullwise.”
The price of electricity is going through the roof in Europe, Before 2020, €75 to €100 per MWh was considered expensive. Now, costs north of €600 are common.
Exit Question: What did The Greens use before candles and wood stoves?
It is beyond dispute that the state exercises very great power over human life and it always shows a tendency to go beyond the limits laid down for it.
—Nikolai Berdyaev
After informing us last week that inflation had disappeared, Joe Xiden is doing his part to get thing back on track by signing an Inflation Revitalization Act.
And in other news, the weekly chocolate ration will be increased from 30 grams to 20 grams.
Earlier this year, we learned that the Department of Homeland Security was setting up a group of Fact Chekists to scrutinize “disinformation,” Now, the IRS is being funded to hire 87,000 more employees, more than doubling the agency’s headcount, and IRS’s new funding is coming via an “Inflation Reduction Act” which will exacerbate inflation.
The meanings of words are be tortured.
It was impossible to translate any passage of Oldspeak into Newspeak unless it either referred to some technical process or some very simple everyday action, or was already orthodox (GOODTHINKFUL would be the Newspeak expression) in tendency. In practice this meant that no book written before approximately 1960 could be translated as a whole. Pre-revolutionary literature could only be subjected to ideological translation—that is, alteration in sense as well as language. Take for example the well-known passage from the Declaration of Independence:
WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT, THAT ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL, THAT THEY ARE ENDOWED BY THEIR CREATOR WITH CERTAIN INALIENABLE RIGHTS, THAT AMONG THESE ARE LIFE, LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS. THAT TO SECURE THESE RIGHTS, GOVERNMENTS ARE INSTITUTED AMONG MEN, DERIVING THEIR POWERS FROM THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED. THAT WHENEVER ANY FORM OF GOVERNMENT BECOMES DESTRUCTIVE OF THOSE ENDS, IT IS THE RIGHT OF THE PEOPLE TO ALTER OR ABOLISH IT, AND TO INSTITUTE NEW GOVERNMENT …
It would have been quite impossible to render this into Newspeak while keeping to the sense of the original. The nearest one could come to doing so would be to swallow the whole passage up in the single word CRIMETHINK.
Things are becoming double plus ungood.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
—Henry Kissinger
Scream or not, it doesn’t matter.
—Lavrentiy Beria
I initially applied the Twenty-four Hour Rule to comments on the Mar-a-Largo raid, and look how the various leaks and public statements and further leaks have twisted the alleged facts of the matter. It was leaked that AG Garland was out of the loop, and now he’s sorta/kinda admitted to approving that the warrant be sought. As I type this, the White House is still disclaiming any knowledge.
And so it goes.
Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical.
—Blaise Pascal
I just had a conversation with a recent widow who has spent the past five months trying to get changes in her Social Security payments straightened out. She made the observation that everyone she’s talked to appeared to be overwhelmed by their workloads.
And in other news, the government now plans to hire 87,000 new IRS agents.
The Hill reports DC Mayor Muriel Bowser has asked for the National Guard to be activated to help manage an influx of illegal aliens into the city. Bowser has sent a letter to the White House which says in part:
Our ability to assist people in need at this scale is very limited. Instead of rolling up their sleeves and working with the Biden/Harris Administration on a real solution, Governors Abbot and Ducey have decided to use desperate people to score political points. … With pledges from Texas and Arizona to continue these abhorrent operations indefinitely, the situation is dire, and we consider this a humanitarian crisis—one that could overwhelm our social support network without immediate and sustained federal intervention.
How do things which cannot go on come to an end?
Slowly. And then suddenly.
To be fair, she’s not a biologist economist.
Shot:
Chaser:
The Washington Free Beacon reports—
Does this means that we’ll have transition to non-binary computers?
The Supreme Court vacated the Ninth Circuit’s decision upholding Hawaii’s restrictive carry permit regime in Young v. Hawaii and remanded the case for reconsideration in light of Bruen. Young filed a motion for summary reversal with the Ninth Circuit, and Hawaii has filed a motion seeking to delay the inevitable.
It looks as if the Democrats plan to engage in the same sort of massive resistance to the expansion of civil rights as they did in the ’60s.
If the right people don’t have power, do you know what happens? The wrong people get it: politicians, councillors, ordinary voters!
—Sir Humphrey Appleby