1) Jobs Market Is Hot, But Not As Hot As Advertised
For the last several months we’ve highlighted what we call the tale of two employment reports. The survey of business establishments has shown steady growth in employment and the smaller survey of households has shown virtually no job growth since March.
This pattern held again for the November jobs report released Friday. Employment was up in the establishment survey by 263k, but the household survey dropped 138k. The divergence since March now stands at an enormous 2.7 million jobs.
One reason is double counting in the establishment survey, with over 900k of the jobs added in the last year being workers with second jobs, not additional people employed.
To be sure, it is still a hot employment market for workers with some 10 million job openings. Count us as skeptical that this rosy jobs market will continue much longer.
The economy is hemorrhaging full-time jobs – we’ve lost over 2,600 full-time jobs every day since May.
A full 25 months after the 2020 election, former Twitter executives are finally admitting they were wrong to censor the Hunter Biden story.
During the 2020 presidential campaign, Joe Biden got an assist from the mainstream media which worked overtime to dismiss the Hunter Biden laptop story as Russian disinformation. Twitter suspended the New York Post’s account for reporting on it. The media beat up Trump for bringing up Hunter because they kept saying his dirty dealings were, as Judy Woodruff put it in her famous interview with Trump before the election, “unsubstantiated.”
Jack Dorsey, who was Twitter’s CEO in 2020, has already admitted to censoring the Hunter scandal.
Now Yael Roth, Twitter’s former director of “trust and safety” has admitted it was a mistake during a Knight Foundation conference in New York.
“We didn’t know what to believe, we didn’t know what was true, there was smoke — and ultimately it didn’t reach a place where I was comfortable removing this content from Twitter,” Roth said. But remove it Twitter did. In doing so, Twitter along with other media outlets that ignored the corruption story pit their thumb on the election scale in favor of Joe Biden.
Elon Musk, Twitter’s new CEO, responded to Roth’s mea culpa:
And he followed that up with disclosure of a huge cache of documents via reporter Matt Taibbi:
Still, the media ignores one of the biggest stories of political corruption and then pouts that so much of the public holds journalists in utter contempt.
3) The “Beverly Hills Cop” Who Made $716,284 Last Year
California currently has a $25 billion deficit. It also is the only state without a central database to track spending. Some documents are kept only on paper, not online.
So our friends at Open The Books filed 442 separate Freedom of Information Act requests in California last year. It took a subpoena, a court case, and hundreds of hours but they now have a complete line-by-line spending report.
Now we know some of the things the state and its local government units have been hiding.
In a satire worthy of the movie “Beverly Hills Cop,” the assistant police chief of that wealthy LA enclave made $716,284 in 2021, even though only 30 percent of that was in regular income. The rest was mostly compensation for unused leave.
Another 100 California municipal employees took home $439,000 or more in annual wages last year. The top 10 include two fire captains in Los Angeles and a load dispatcher at the LA Department of Water & Power. And that’s not counting the benefits, which include the almost certain odds that none of them will be laid off. Most of them worked for local governments in and around San Francisco.
4) Switzerland To BAN Using Electric Cars For Trips Deemed "Non-Essential"
Switzerland is anything but a socialist police state, but now in energy states of emergency – which are happening more and more often in Euroland – electric cars can only be driven for emergency purposes.
This sounds a lot like a lockdown to us — with the ironic twist that the people hardest hit would be the electric car drivers.
Switzerland will ban the use of electric cars for 'non-essential' journeys if the country runs out of energy this winter, the government has announced.
Emergency plans drawn up in the event the Swiss are hit by blackouts also call for shop opening hours to be reduced by up to two hours per day, heating systems in nightclubs to be turned off, and other buildings to be heated to no more than 20C.
Crisis measures could see streaming services and games consoles banned, Christmas lights turned off, and all sports stadiums and leisure facilities closed.
Where does America’s national character come from? Actually, you could make a good case that it’s … all from one guy.
Entrepreneurial, inventive, charitable, patriotic, creative, witty, and even sometimes reckless: our new video explains why Benjamin Franklin may just have been the prototypical American.
Watch this video with your kids or friends who reject the idea of American greatness.
