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Best of the Web: Inflation rose 7.9% in February, as food and energy costs push prices to highest in more than 40 years

Jeff Cox
CNBC
Thu, 10 Mar 2022 19:49 UTC
grocery store
Inflation grew worse in February amid the escalating crisis in Ukraine and price pressures that became more entrenched.

The consumer price index, which measures a wide-ranging basket of goods and services, increased 7.9% over the past 12 months, a fresh 40-year high for the closely followed gauge, according to the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The February acceleration was the fastest pace since January1982, back when the U.S. economy confronted the twin threat of higher inflation and reduced economic growth.

On a month-over-month basis, the CPI gain was 0.8%. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had expected headline inflation to increase 7.8% for the year and 0.7% for the month.

Food prices rose 1% and food at home jumped 1.4%, both the fastest monthly gains since April 2020, in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Comment: That's the official rate. God only knows what the more realistic rate is.

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Laptop

YouTube to demonetize all Russian users, ban 'state media'


RT
Fri, 11 Mar 2022 19:55 UTC
russia today canceled youtube rt
© YouTube/screenshotRT's channel on YouTube, March 11, 2022
YouTube, owned by Google's parent company Alphabet, announced on Friday it would block access to "Russian state media" channels across the globe and block all monetization on its platform inside Russia, citing the conflict in Ukraine.

The video-sharing platform wants to remove content "denying, minimizing or trivializing well-documented violent events," as it goes against its Community Guidelines, YouTube said in a statement on Friday, specifically referring to content "about Russia's invasion in Ukraine that violates this policy."

Having blocked RT and Sputnik in the European Union - at the request of EU governments - on March 1, YouTube announced on Friday it was expanding this censorship to the entire planet, and including all channels "associated with Russian state-funded media."

The change is "effective immediately," YouTube said, adding that its systems may take a little while to process it.

YouTube ads have already been "paused" in Russia, but the platform is now extending this to "all of the ways to monetize on our platform" in the country, presumably affecting super-chats and sponsorships as well.

Comment: So much for 'Western values', you know, free speech and all that.

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NPC

'Freedom Convoy' accused of trying to overthrow government


RT
Fri, 11 Mar 2022 11:31 UTC
freedom convoy confrontation police
© Steve Russell / Toronto Star / Getty ImagesProtesters from the "Freedom Convoy" in Ottawa clash with police officers.
The protest saw Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoke the Emergencies Act for the first time.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's national security adviser, Jody Thomas, has accused the anti-Covid-vaccine-mandate 'Freedom Convoy' protests of seeking to "overthrow the government" by occupying Ottawa.

Speaking to the Ottawa Conference on Security and Defense on Thursday, Thomas claimed that "there is no doubt" that the organizers of the protest "came to overthrow the government," with a well prepared demonstration that had supply chains and funding.

Comment: History is being rewritten right in front of our eyes. The trucker convoy was now 'extremists' trying to take over the government (despite never making any moves to do so). We hope Canadians are paying attention, because this kind of rhetoric is dangerous to the extreme.

See also:

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Chart Bar

Poll: Majority of Americans blame Joe Biden for Putin's invasion of Ukraine

Steve Watson
Summit News
Thu, 10 Mar 2022 23:33 UTC
biden to blame for ukraine
62% said they believe Putin would not have invaded if President Trump had been reelected.

A HarrisX poll has revealed that most Americans see Joe Biden as a primary reason Russia decided to invade Ukraine.

The survey found that 58% of Americans believe Biden's toothlessness has prompted Vladimir Putin to push ahead with the conflict.

Comment: The idea that your average American is willing to pay exorbitant prices for gas to 'punish Russia' is completely deluded. They're telling people how they think they should feel, not how they do feel. Mind programming 101.

See also:

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Target

Doocy asks if White House is going to blame 'Putin for everything until the midterms'

Jarryd Jaeger
The Post Millennial
Thu, 10 Mar 2022 21:40 UTC
psaki doocy
The Biden administration has repeatedly been criticized for their insistence that Russia is causing gas prices in the US to rise.

When the issue came up during Thursday's press briefing, Doocy asked if the White House is "going to start blaming Putin for everything until the midterms?"

Comment: See also:

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Arrow Down

Unpopular virtue signal: DuckDuckGo 'down-ranks' Russian 'disinformation'; search engine's users are not happy

Matt Binder
Mashable
Thu, 10 Mar 2022 00:01 UTC
duckduckgo
Is DuckDuckGo turning on its users, or did they misunderstand the search engine to begin with?

Tech companies are continuing to take action as Russia's war in Ukraine rages on. Search engine DuckDuckGo is the latest platform to take measures in the information war that's being battled online.

According to DuckDuckGo's founder and CEO, Gabriel Weinberg, the privacy-focused search engine has "down-ranked" websites in its search results that are "associated with Russian disinformation."

Comment: Another one bites the dust. What these tech platforms don't seem to understand (or don't actually care) is that normal functioning adults want the power to decide for themselves what constitutes disinformation and don't want some uninformed Silicon Valley nerd making those decisions for them. DDG has just outed itself as no better than any of the other Big Tech extensions of the state propaganda arm. RIP.

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Biohazard

Moscow calls for strengthening bioweapons treaty


RT
Wed, 09 Mar 2022 07:52 UTC
Biohazard Lab
© Jon Cherry / Getty Images
Mandatory international inspections could keep US labs in check, Russia suggested

An international treaty banning bioweapons needs to be strengthened with a compliance verification mechanism, contrary to the US position on the issue, Moscow said on Wednesday. The call comes in the wake of the reported discovery of evidence that there were lethal pathogens at Pentagon-backed labs in Ukraine.

The Russian military reported this week that Ukrainian authorities had ordered the destruction of highly pathogenic samples that were stored at US-backed biological labs throughout the country.

The purported documents indicate that both Ukraine and the US breached the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), which both nations signed and ratified, the Russian foreign ministry alleged on Wednesday. The order to destroy the samples was an attempt to cover up the violations of the treaty, it said.
"We stand for the resumption of the work on a legally binding Protocol to the Convention for an effective verification mechanism, which the US has been stonewalling since 2001," the ministry said.

Comment: If they were monitoring possible emerging infection threats around the world, then they don't have to worry if research materials come into Russian hands. Nobody says it is a undesirable thing to do. That knowledge can help humanity.

But since they panic so much about all the biolabs in Ukraine, maybe more nefarious things were done there. Chinese and Russian authorities most likely have more information about what kind of "research" was conducted in these labs.

See also:

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X

University censors student's anti-censorship musical theatre project

Logan Dubil
The College Fix
Thu, 10 Mar 2022 08:16 UTC
anti censorship musical
A student at Friends University was forced to move her recital about songs from musicals that have faced censorship off campus due to donor complaints and content concerns.

Caitlyn Fox's honors project — "The Shows They Don't Want Us to Produce: A Study of Censorship Throughout the History of Musical Theatre" — was required to relocate last minute despite its initial approval.

"I was incredibly frustrated and blindsided," Fox told The College Fix.

Friends University is a private Christian college in Wichita, Kansas.

"The university had to make a difficult 11th-hour decision after receiving a formal complaint from the fine arts department regarding offensive language and sexually explicit content in the recital," said Friends University spokeswoman Laura Fuller in an email to The College Fix on Wednesday.
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Pirates

Best of the Web: NATO White Helmets follow al-Qaeda to Ukraine

Vanessa Beeley
OffGuardian
Thu, 10 Mar 2022 07:17 UTC
syria
Four-hundred and fifty extremists from Idlib, north-west Syria have arrived in Ukraine according to Al Mayadeen.

Hailing from Idlib - the "largest Al Qaeda haven since 9/11"- these fanatics from various countries have been despatched to Ukraine to fight against the Russian forces that alongside the Syrian Arab Amy signified the end of their Caliphatist dreams in Syria.

These extremists passed through Turkey, a NATO member state, to arrive at their destination in western Ukraine. According to Al Mayadeen:
senior fighters from the terrorist group Hayat Tahrir-Al-Sham (rebranded version of Jabhat Al Nusra aka Al Qaeda) have held a number of meetings with senior leaders in the Turkistan Islamic Party group and Ansar Al Tawhid and Hurras Al Din groups, and agreed on allowing a number of their fighters to enter Ukraine through Turkey".
According to the Counter Extremist Project:
Hurras al-Din and its leaders are U.S. Specially Designated Global Terrorists. The U.S. presently offers a $5 million reward for information on three of its leaders"
Yet here they are fighting for NATO member states, led by the US, in Ukraine, alongside the NATO fascist and Neo-Nazi contras.
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Light Saber

Freedom Convoy organizer Tamara Lich wins review, granted bail


Rebel News
Mon, 07 Mar 2022 06:40 UTC
Tamara Lich
Tamara Lich, one of the organizers behind the Freedom Convoy, has won an appeal and will now be granted bail.

Initially taken into custody by police in Ottawa on the evening of Feb. 17, Lich has remained behind bars since. At a previous bail hearing on Feb. 22, Lich had her request for bail denied by Justice Julie Bourgeois, a former Liberal Party candidate who Lich accused of holding a political bias in the case.

Late week, Lich was back in front of a judge requesting a bail review, a hearing that was documented by Ottawa-based lawyer David Anber.

Today, a judge reversed the original decision and granted Lich bail.

Comment: Additional reporting from CP24:
[...]

Lich -- described by a lawyer for convoy protesters in February as "the spark that lit this fire" -- was one of the most public faces of the protest that saw crowds move in with big-rigs and other vehicles in late January to protest the federal Liberal government, vaccine mandates and COVID-19 restrictions.

Since her arrest, her supporters have called her a political prisoner during her time in jail, and over the weekend some rallied outside the Ottawa jail where she is being held to demand her release.

That push reached all the way to the United Kingdom Monday, where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, in London for meetings with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, was greeted outside 10 Downing Street by protesters spewing a chorus of expletives, and waving signs demanding that Lich be freed.

Lich was initially denied bail on Feb. 22 after Ontario Court Justice Julie Bourgeois deemed her detention was "necessary for the protection and safety of the public."

In a bail review hearing last week, Lich's lawyer argued that decision may have been tainted by the fact that Bourgeois ran as a federal Liberal candidates in the 2011 election and expressed that her own community had been affected by the protest.

On Monday, Superior Court Justice John M. Johnston found no merit to those arguments, and said the case was not about politics but the rule of law.

But he did find several other errors of law in that decision. He said the previous justice was too subjective when assessing the gravity of the offences, weighing them against the impacts to Ottawa's residents rather than objectively comparing them to other offences in the Criminal Code. He also said that while Bourgeois determined Lich could serve a lengthy prison sentence of up to 10 years, he thought it very unlikely she would serve more than two years if convicted.

[...]


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