Biden says gas in California has always cost $7 a gallon

The New Neo Posted on by

This happened yesterday:

“The inflation report is out. Have you seen gas prices around here in LA? It’s 7 bucks a gallon almost,” a reporter asked Biden as he paid for food at a Los Angeles-based taco shop.

“Well, that’s always been the case here,” Biden replied. “You know, it’s not — what — nationwide, [gas prices] came down about $1.35, and they’re still down over a dollar. But we’re going to work on, housing is the big, is the most important thing we have to do in terms of that.”

The explanation?

(1) Biden lives in the moment; past and future don’t exist.

(2) Biden’s been rereading Nineteen Eighty-Four, and since “Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia” worked for Ingsoc, he figures it’ll work for him.

(3) Math is hard.

(4) The last time Biden bought gas in California was never.

(5) Newsom told him so.

Actually, though, I think I know what Biden might have been trying (and totally failing) to convey. It would go something like this: ‘It’s always been the case that gas is more expensive in California than in other states. You know, it’s not as high elsewhere right now as in California — nationwide, gas prices came down about $1.35 from their recent high, and they’re still down over a dollar from that. But in terms of inflation, what we’re going to work on, housing is the most important thing we have to do in terms of that.’

You can still find enormous fault with the message, but at least it would be intelligible. What Biden said was not.

Biden has never been a particularly intelligent man, nor has he been a good communicator. Now his thoughts are more confused than ever, and his communications are more fragmented. You shouldn’t need a translator to understand a president’s meaning when he speaks – although you can’t go wrong if you always assume that Biden is intending to excuse himself and blame others, or bend the truth to his own advantage. In that, he’s not much different than many politicians; just more so, and also so cognitively challenged that it’s hard to tell what the thought is behind the words.

Some would say there isn’t a thought behind the words. But I’ve long differed on that. I think that despite his cognitive decline, Biden retains the ability to understand the basics, to connive and to lie, to be corrupt and nasty, and to play to his leftist base. He’s just nowhere near as good at it as he’d like to be, and not even as good at it as he used to be.

Open thread 10/18/22

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s Ken Berry doing the best Fred Astaire imitation I’ve ever seen, including his mannerisms and walk. Come to think of it, though, I’ve never seen another Fred Astaire imitation:

The Gramscian march through arts institutions – and arts funding

The New Neo Posted on by

Some years ago – perhaps ten? – I pretty much stopped going to art museums. Most of the exhibits were no longer of art I wanted to see, and even the ones that seemed promising turned out to be an excuse for relentless leftist political venting by curators and the people writing the copy accompanying each work of art. The final straw, I seem to recall, was an exhibit (I forget where) of 19th and early 20th Century American paintings that served as an occasion for the repetitive trashing of the US as an irredeemably racist, sexist, everything-baddist country.

Today at Ace’s there’s a post describing the recent attack by climate activists on a Van Gogh in a London art museum. It turns out the museum authorities seem to have given it the go-ahead:

ou have most likely heard by now about the eco-vandals who threw tomato soup on Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” at London’s National Gallery. Actually, it wasn’t so much vandalism as it was performance art.

As shown in the photo immediately below, and in the video embedded in Fen de Villiers tweet just below that, a phalanx of media had set itself up to witness the event. The vandals were not only unchallenged when crossing barriers set up to protect the artwork, but they were then allowed to perform their stunt, with plenty of time to pose and make statements to the assembled media, without any efforts by the museum staff to stop them…

It’s not just the left-wing politics of individual museums that are the problem. It is structural throughout the industry. For art museums to receive the most prestigious accreditation, they must be engaged in left-wing activism.

In one of the cities I have lived, there is a museum – which somehow remains a source of great civic pride – which displays virtually nothing but art that professes hatred of the United States and western civilization. There is no expectation that the featured artists have any actual artistic talent, only that they identify with a victim group and that their art conveys a bold statement about how much they detest this country and its heritage.

This museum recently sent out a press release touting its re-accreditation by the American Alliance of Museums, which it states is “the highest national recognition afforded the nation’s museums.”

This leftism has been going on for a long time, and it’s encouraged by the money- and credentials-granting institutions. No wonder it’s taken over so seemingly completely.

In connection with my recent Saturday dance post, I happened across a discussion of an article that had been written by the well-known dance critic Arlene Croce in 1995, which ties into the subject I’m writing about here. It struck me when I read about it that these policies were already well-established nearly thirty years ago, perhaps even longer. Here are some excerpts from what Croce wrote, in which she explained why she wouldn’t be reviewing some dance performance art about AIDS, by choreographer Bill T. Jones, who is black, gay, and HIV-positive (Jones is still alive, by the way, so he must have still been around when treatments improved) [emphasis mine]:

I have not seen Bill T. Jones’s Still/Here and have no plans to review it. . . . By working dying people into his act, Jones is putting himself beyond the reach of criticism. I think of him as literally undiscussable—the most extreme case among the distressingly many now representing themselves to the public not as artists but as victims and martyrs…

What Jones represents is something new in victim art—new and raw and deadly in its power over the human conscience.

The arts bureaucracy in this country, which includes government and private-funding agencies, has in recent years demonstrated a blatant bias for utilitarian art — art that justifies the bureaucracy’s existence by being socially useful. This bias is inherent in the nature of government . . . by the late 80’s, the ethos of community outreach had reached out and swallowed everything else; it was the only way the NEA [National Endowment for the Arts] could survive. The private funders soon knuckled under to the community-and minority-minded lobbies—the whole dynamic of funding, which keeps the biggest government grants flowing on a matching-funds basis, made the knuckling under inevitable. But ideology had something to do with this. . . . The ideological boosters of utilitarian art hark back to the political crusades of the 60’s—against Vietnam, for civil rights. The 60’s, in turn, harked back to the proletarian 30’s, when big-government bureaucracy began. And now once again after a 30-year lapse we are condemned to repeat history.

Croce located the beginning of these policies prior to the late 80s, by which point she says they had “swallowed everything else.” I vaguely recall the flap that her essay made in the 90s, because I followed dance criticism at the time. But I understood neither its significance nor its dangers. But now we see the decades-later results of the trends she described.

Monday roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) No-filter Joe strikes again and insults Pakistan. Diplomats in the region have to clean up the mess:

Pakistani officials said Saturday they had summoned the US ambassador to the country following recent comments made by President Joe Biden that doubted the safety of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.

Speaking at a Democratic Party fundraiser in Los Angeles on Thursday, Biden said Pakistan was “one of the most dangerous nations in the world” because it has “nuclear weapons without any cohesion,” according to a transcript of the speech released by the White House.

Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif shot back Saturday at Biden’s comments. “Pakistan is a responsible nuclear state and we are proud that our nuclear assets have the best safeguards as per IAEA requirements,” Sharif tweeted, referring to the International Atomic Energy Agency. “We take these safety measures with the utmost seriousness. Let no one have any doubts.”…

A US official confirmed to CNN that Blome was summoned by Pakistan’s foreign ministry following Biden’s remarks. Those remarks frustrated US diplomats in the region, the US official said.

(2) Why are these sorts of gain-of-function experiments still being allowed to go on? The ostensible reason is “getting ahead of a future outbreak,” but the possible benefits seem small compared to the possible risks. In this case, Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories researchers took the very-contagious but relatively mild Omicron strain and wedded it to the original more-lethal strain, and got a COVID virus that killed 80% of the mice it infected. Here’s a link to the research report.

(3) Alan Dershowitz writes about academia’s sacrifice of meritocracy to mediocracy. Politics and right-think have become all-important:

It is not surprising that universities will have to lower academic standards for performance if they lower academic standards for admission. It would be unfair to admit some students on lower academic admissions standards and then impose historic performance standards on them. That would make it difficult for them to compete against students who had to meet more rigorous standards for admission.

That’s one way of eliminating one of the objections many people have to affirmative-action admissions: that many such students struggle academically once admitted.

(4) Russian drone attacks in Kyiv:

Russia blasted the Ukrainian capital with a deadly wave of “kamikaze” drones Monday, in a renewed attack that set apartments ablaze as soldiers fired into the air…

Ukraine said the attacks included Iranian-made drones, which it has accused Moscow of increasingly deploying as it runs low on precision missiles, and appealed again for Western allies to provide aerial defensive help.

(5) More information comes out implicating Warnock in evictions:

…[W]hat Warnock said is not true, as the Free Beacon reporter Andrew Kerr, who broke the story, explained:

“Warnock is lying. 12 eviction lawsuits have been filed against residents of the building owned by his church since 2020. I talked with some of those sued who paid over 2 months’ worth of rent in court fees to stay in their homes. 2 lawsuits resulted in court-ordered evictions.”

Compare and contrast: three women dance ballet to classical music

The New Neo Posted on by

The other day the following little ballet to music by Beethoven, set on three women, appeared in my YouTube recommendations. And so I watched it. I didn’t hate it but I didn’t much like it: too static, very “on the music” in a way that seemed rigid and unimaginative, no especially interesting patterns in the placement and movement of the women in relation to each other, and ornate “fussy” arms with wrists that break the line.

Judge for yourself, though:

However, the ballet evoked remembrance of ballets past. In case you think that business of the three dancers in a row behind each other is an innovation, let me introduce you to Balanchine’s “Apollo,” composed to Stravinsky in 1928. That’s nearly 100 years ago. It was extremely innovative at the time, and it has lasted. It’s about the birth and growth of Apollo, helped by the three muses of poetry, mime, and dance. Here are a couple of very short excerpts, performed by the very same company as that first clip above, the Royal Ballet:

Another long ballet comes to mind with the following short segment for three women (one man briefly enters about halfway in and rather quickly exits). Set to Chopin, it is Jerome Robbins’ “Dances At a Gathering” from 1969. I saw the original many times, and although the dancers in this video (National Opera of Paris, 2014) lack some of the expressive beauty and feeling and flow I recall from those earlier days, it will nevertheless give you some idea of what I’m talking about. The movements seem naturalistic and almost inevitable rather than strained:

I hesitated to put the following clip up, although it features three women plus three men from that same 2014 Paris Opera production, and is one of my very favorite segments from “Dances At a Gathering,” a work I consider a ballet masterpiece. It just doesn’t seem to have the sweep and power of this segment in the original when seen in person – at least, as I remember it. That was absolutely thrilling and made the audience gasp at what I call the “swoops” and the “tosses.” Here the swoops (3:14 to 3:45) aren’t done with the same abandon, and the tosses (4:34 to 4:48) look a bit like the men are throwing around sacks of potatoes. Picture something far more dramatic and yet appearing completely easy at the same time, an expression of pure delight.

And yet…and yet…it’s still is very beautiful. I think these dancers do as well as any modern dancers can – the sensibility of ballet has changed, and there is much more emphasis on technique – and the choreography remains impressive in its use of the music’s threes and dramatic crescendos:

Enjoy:

Walker and Warnock had a debate last night

The New Neo Posted on by

Expectations were low for Walker, who’s not known for nimble speech. Apparently he way exceeded expectations, at least according to observers on the right (see this and this, for example, including some clips as well).

The way CNN covered the debate it seems to me that Walker really did land some blows, although CNN doesn’t quite say that. And the Savannah Morning News published an opinion column by Adam Van Brimmer headlined this way: “Herschel Walker beat expectations in Georgia U.S. Senate debate. Will it matter in election?”

Will it matter? My question exactly, and one that’s unanswerable. But here’s an excerpt from the piece:

Yes, Georgia, your favorite football icon showed political acumen in his first-ever debate showdown. He didn’t ramble. He didn’t get flustered. He didn’t talk about “bad air,” trees, evolution or a COVID-19 killing mist.

He was charming. He was quick-witted. He came across as the more genuine of the candidates – he out-Warnocked Sen. Raphael Warnock.

For a self-professed “country boy” who claims to be “not that smart,” Walker delivered a remarkable performance. He didn’t bother to visit the post-debate media “spin room” to clarify or expound on anything. The debate’s close was a mic-drop/football-spike worthy moment.

But the writer doesn’t think it will matter:

Can one good night – one good hour – negate months of buffoonery? In a race devoid of undecided voters, did Walker convince anyone to reconsider? Did he give Trump diehards confidence that he can win and that they, with few other Trump faves on the ballot, should take the time to go to the polls and vote for him?

Not likely…

Still, Warnock best recognize the threat ahead and take appropriate political action. Like most Georgians, he must have assumed Walker would make a fool of himself on the debate stage and Friday would serve as a de facto coronation. Even with Walker working to lower expectations – remember that “I’m not that smart” quote? – Warnock couldn’t have seen his opponent debating like a pro.

The article concludes with a reminder that Georgia requires that a candidate get 50% of the vote in order to avoid a runoff. Many people probably recall that that’s the way Warnock won in 2020 – in a runoff that occurred about two months after the regular general election, a runoff in which both Democrats won their Senate seats to give the Democratic Party a bare Senate majority (counting Kamala Harris’ vote) in the Senate.

I was unfamiliar with the Savannah Morning News or the writer Adam Van Brimmer, and so I did a little research. The guy is not a Walker fan. For example, here’s what he wrote just a couple of days prior to the debate:

Which brings us back to the [Walker/Warnock] debate…and what to expect.

I anticipate a cancellation…

Nothing [Walker] says or does from this point forward will sway undecideds to his side or motivate disengaged voters to come to the polls. Prior to the abortion allegations and his son’s damning tweets, Walker might have had some room to score political points in a tête-à-tête with Warnock.

At worst, he would struggle and be able to paint Warnock the bully and angle for sympathy…

…[Y]ou have those [Republicans] who find Walker an embarrassment and won’t vote for him even in the privacy of a polling booth or absentee ballot. They might not throw in for Warnock, but they have too much self-respect to cast a ballot for Walker.

Walker’s only incentive to go through with Friday’s showdown is to make history with the most dumbfounding and humiliating debate performance ever.

The only mystery is what excuse will he use to cancel?

He could pray for a hurricane evacuation, but the National Hurricane Center’s outlook shows no activity in the Atlantic Ocean.

He could feign illness – COVID-19 is still spreading in Georgia, and Walker’s magic COVID-killing mist isn’t a real thing.

He could manufacture an issue with the venue, which is so small the host isn’t making tickets available to the public and thereby violates Walker’s pledge that “this debate is going to be about the people.

Other problems could crop up at the 11th hour. A bus breakdown. Bad directions. A mix-up on time and date.

That’s what’s meant by “defying expectations.”

Russian leaders: intelligence officials all the way down

The New Neo Posted on by

If true, this article on the Russian leadership is certainly depressing. I have no way to know whether it’s true, but my gut feeling is that it is.

It makes some interesting points, for example that the reason the Russian higher-ups didn’t stop hundreds of thousands of men from leaving the country to avoid conscription is that the emigration got rid of people who would be troublemakers and protestors anyway, leaving those who are more supportive of the Ukrainian war (and the regime in general) and/or more malleable. So why bother? Those leaving weren’t needed as additional cannon fodder – Russia has plenty of that – even though they tended to be among the more educated in the population.

Here’s the basic thesis of the article:

The main challenge to Putin’s power, then, comes not from the street but from within the regime itself…

Institutionally, the Kremlin has for years been effectively an extension of the Federal Security Service, or FSB. The three most powerful men in Russia today are all current or former FSB chiefs — Putin himself, the Security Council chairman Nikolai Patrushev and the current FSB head Alexander Bortnikov…

Modern Russia is not just a security state but literally a state that has been taken over by its own security services. Putin is the ultimate decision-maker and arbiter in various disputes between rival factions inside that extended FSB-connected ruling class…

So when we consider whether regime change is possible in Russia, what we are really wondering is whether some outside force could ever challenge the rule, not of Putin himself, but of the extended FSB clan that currently holds ultimate political and economic power.

The army has not played a decisive political role in Russia since the aftermath of Stalin’s death in 1953, when Marshal Georgy Zhukov effectively pulled off an armed coup by arresting and soon after murdering KGB boss Lavrentiy Beria. Ever since that painful showdown between soldiers and secret police, the KGB and FSB made very sure that Russia’s military had no role in internal security — most recently by creating the Russian National Guard, headed naturally by a former KGB man, Putin’s former body-guard Viktor Zolotov. The silent majority of Russia’s elite — the mid-level bureaucrats, professionals and business-people who have been robbed of their futures and their wealth by the war — are by all accounts collectively horrified by it. Notionally these people represent significant economic and bureaucratic power. But they have no organized political voice and generally have too much to lose to risk rebellion.

So when Kadyrov, Prigozhin and the other heavily armed patriotic critics attack the failed war effort, they are not so much challenging the status quo as jockeying for advantage within it. And they succeed in advancing up the chain of command to positions of greater influence. There are other critical voices… All have called for Putin to be more ruthless and aggressive in Ukraine…

The power of the extended FSB dwarfs that of any potential challengers except for one: a rising, angry people who feel cheated of victory by their corrupt leaders.

It doesn’t sound as though that last sentence describes an uprising that’s likely to happen, or is likely to succeed if it does happen.

As I read the article, it occurred to me that, although the situation in the US is markedly different in many ways, it’s nowhere near as different as one would like. In other words, the intelligence apparatus in this country has grown entrenched, partisan, and very powerful. It is putting out false information and withholding true information in order to get its preferred candidates elected, with the cooperation of the MSM to which it feeds selected information. Even when the intelligence community’s mendacious influence is exposed, nothing seems to change and the perpetrators go free and either continue in power or become pundits or behind-the-scenes string pullers.

Only half the nation’s citizens seem to care about this; the rest seem to either be ignorant of it or applaud it. And it’s not at all clear that there’s a good way out of this mess we’re in.

The Danchenko trial: on framing Trump, on exonerating Hunter

The New Neo Posted on by

There is a lot of reportage (on the right, anyway) about some of the revelations in the Danchenko trial. I’ve been meaning to write a post about that. But one of the problems is that the legal issues in the trial are a bit difficult to understand, and not many of the explanations offer sufficient clarification of what’s going on.

The other thing that has me dragging my heels is that I strongly suspect this trial will not matter. The half of the country on the Democrat side, and most of the MSM, will ignore the shocking parts and/or emphasize the parts that can be spun in a way more favorable to the FBI and the Democrats.

And a conviction probably won’t happen. Here’s Andrew C. McCarthy on why a conviction will be difficult:

A witness cannot properly be accused of lying if he has not been asked a question that would necessarily have elicited the information the government claims has been withheld. It is objectionable for a prosecutor to ask me, “Isn’t it a fact that you never told the FBI you robbed the bank?” if there is no evidence that the FBI ever asked me whether I robbed the bank. It is not my job to volunteer information (let alone incriminating information); it is the investigators’ job to ask.

It is entirely possible — I’d be willing to bet that it’s likely — that Danchenko was disingenuous in his some of his discussions with the FBI about the sources of information that he fed to Steele. But to prove that he intentionally made false statements, the prosecution will have to establish that he was asked sharp questions and gave clear answers that were plainly untrue.

In other words, here’s my understanding of what’s going on: with Russiagate and the Steele dossier: the FBI clearly did not want to know the truth and in fact actively avoided seeking it. They instead appear to have been intent on implicating Trump and therefore did not pursue the obvious holes in the stories being told. Therefore convicting someone like Danchenko will be difficult (as it was with Sussman). Because the FBI was guilty of essentially framing the president, being lied to or misled was accomplished with the FBI’s willing participation, and prosecuting someone under a law about lying to the FBI becomes an uphill battle.

Earlier, McCarthy wrote this:

It remains to be seen whether Durham can prove these charges…

What is not in doubt, though, is that the trial is highlighting the FBI’s shocking malfeasance in the Trump-Russia “collusion” probe, which it codenamed “Crossfire Hurricane.”

The first witness in the case was FBI supervisory intelligence analyst Brian Auten, of whom Durham himself conducted the prosecution’s questioning. Auten conceded the FBI had offered Steele $1 million if he could prove his sensational allegations that Trump was in cahoots with the regime of Vladimir Putin and that the Kremlin was positioned to blackmail the then-candidate because it supposedly possessed a video recording of Trump engaging in sexual hijinks.

Ultimately, the bureau never had to pay the $1 million because neither Steele nor Danchenko could prove the dossier allegations. In fact, according to court filings, Durham’s investigation has concluded the so-called pee tape was a complete fabrication. Further, when the FBI finally got around to interviewing Danchenko, months after it first received Steele’s reporting, Danchenko debunked it as a screed of rumor and innuendo, much of it exaggerated and gussied up to look like professional intelligence analysis…

More to the point, though, that the FBI offered to pay such an exorbitant sum in hopes Steele’s anti-Trump claims could be backed up is proof positive that the bureau knew these claims were not verified.

That is key. The rules of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and the Justice Department mandate the FBI must verify information before submitting it to the court in applying for surveillance warrants. Even though it could not prove the Steele allegations and had every reason to know they were exaggerated if not out-and-out false, the FBI relied on the Steele claims in sworn applications.

It gets worse. The FBI obtained FISC surveillance warrants to monitor former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page in October 2016 and mid-January 2017, representing to the court that Trump appeared to be in a corrupt conspiracy with the Kremlin. Finally, in late January, the FBI interviewed Danchenko, who debunked Steele’s reporting. Nevertheless, even after speaking with Danchenko, the bureau continued relying on Steele’s allegations when — again under oath — it persuaded the court to extend the surveillance in April and June 2017…

Indeed, not only did the FBI fail to disclose to the Justice Department and the court that Danchenko had contradicted Steele’s claims. The bureau told the court it had interviewed Danchenko to “further corroborate” Steele’s reporting (which actually had not been corroborated). In so doing, the bureau elaborated, it found Danchenko to be “truthful and cooperative.”

Of course, what the FBI didn’t mention was that what Danchenko had been “truthful and cooperative” about was the fact that Steele’s claims were sheer nonsense. Thus, FISC judges were led to believe Danchenko had verified Steele’s reporting when the truth was just the opposite.

There’s also, of course, the fact that some of the agents involved in pushing lies to implicate Trump were the same people involved in pushing lies to exonerate Hunter Biden. That, more than anything else, starkly highlights the FBI’s pro-Democrat bias. They lied to hurt Trump’s chance of re-election and they lied to prop up Biden’s chances (more on that here).

You can find more details about recent testimony in the trial in this piece, which is long but well worth reading. Here’s an excerpt (in the following, Durham asks the questions, and an FBI agent named Helson is answering):

Q. All right. Well, what about looking at what [Danchenko] had said as compared to what the records showed? Did you do that going backward?

A. Not going backwards, no.

Q. Did they make a specific recommendation to you that the Bureau behavioral assessment group conduct an examination to determine what Mr. Danchenko’s actual motives, allegiances and vulnerabilities were?

A. Yes.

Q. And did you do that?

A. No…

Q. Were you — was it recommended that you do an assessment or to look at the financial nature of Mr. Danchenko’s employment because of the concern that he may be prone to shopping around his information in search of work and pre-composing reporting containing unsolicited material, which may indicate the FBI is not the primary audience for his information?

A. Yeah, I saw that in the report.

Q. Did you do that?

A. No.

Q. Was it recommended that the Washington Field Office determine whether Mr. Danchenko committed any unauthorized illegal activity for the apparent falsehoods and inaccuracies contained in his visa and immigration documents?

A. Yes, they recommended that.

Q. Did you do that?

A. No.

Then Durham asked Helson about the Washington Field Office recommendation to polygraph Danchenko, apparently concerned with Danchenko’s loyalties:

Q. Did they specifically recommend to the Washington Field Office and you that you considered administering a polygraph of Mr. Danchenko to determine if he has ever been tasked by a foreign individual, entity or government to collect information or to perform actions adverse to the U.S. interest?

A. They recommended that, yes.

Q. Did you do that?

A. No.

Inflation, recession: “unexpectedly”

The New Neo Posted on by

The economic news is grim, and often described as worse than expected. But for anyone who spends time purchasing groceries – just to take one near-universal example – it’s not really a surprise of any sort.

For example:

Prices consumers pay for a wide variety of goods and services rose more than expected in September as inflation pressures continued to weigh on the U.S. economy.

The consumer price index increased 0.4% for the month, more than the 0.3% Dow Jones estimate, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. On a 12-month basis, so-called headline inflation was up 8.2%, off its peak around 9% in June but still hovering near the highest levels since the early 1980s.

Excluding volatile food and energy prices, core CPI was even higher for the month, accelerating 0.6% against the Dow Jones estimate for a 0.4% increase. Core inflation was up 6.6% from a year ago, the biggest 12-month gain since August 1982.

And then there’s this:

Headline PPI inflation showed prices increasing 0.4 percent in September, double the 0.2 percent economists predicted for a 12-month increase of 8.5 percent, a rate that also surpassed Wall Street estimates. What’s more, the month-over-month number shows that cost increases are accelerating for producers, with final demand services advancing 0.4 percent in September after increasing 0.3 percent in August.

If you need a crib sheet for those acronyms, here it is:

Consumer Price Index (CPI) and Personal Consumption Expenditure (PCE) data measure costs for consumer goods and services. In contrast, Producer Price Index (PPI) measure costs for producers, such as businesses. The PPI was once called the Wholesale Price Index (WPI) which may be a simpler description of what it’s measuring – whole prices rather than consumer prices.

Here’s a pessimistic overview and prediction about the situation:

We are in a recession and we are going into a deep one. I don’t see anything changing until at a bare minimum 2026…

Why do I say 2026 before anything trending now changes?

We have an election in 26 days. Even if the Republicans sweep and take over Congress, there still is an administration running the massive Executive Branch of government that will push inflationary policies. They will continue their war on fossil fuels because of “global warming” which is one of the biggest charlatan canards ever put on humanity. Hence, even with a Republican Congress things only slow down

You assume Republicans will cut spending and do the right things. That’s a big assumption. There is a new crop of Republicans that are running that seem to “get it” and hopefully will be a strong voice in the conversation. They will be better than the Democrats but there are plenty of stupid Republicans. See Mitt Romney and Lindsay Graham.

The next President will assume office in 2025. Assuming he/she is an accomplished executive from the Republican Party, it will take them a year to get their administration up to speed.

Energy underpins the economy. Steady cheap energy helps moderate prices. Manufacturing needs cheap energy. People need cheap energy to get to their place of business. Trucking and shipping need cheap energy to deliver goods.

Are we having fun yet?