Business
Brazilian judge orders complete ban of Elon Musk’s X

From LifeSiteNews
By Stephen Kokx
Notorious left-wing Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes has instructed the government to block access to X. Elon Musk condemned the ruling for ‘crushing the people’s right to free speech.’

BRASILIA, BRAZIL – OCTOBER 30: President of Superior Electoral Tribunal (TSE) Alexandre De Moraes talks during a press conference on October 30, 2022 in Brasilia, Brazil. Brazilians vote for president again after neither Lula or Bolsonaro reached enough support to win in the first round. (Photo by Arthur Menescal/Getty Images 2022)
Notorious left-wing Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes is continuing his autocratic ways.
In a 51-page decision handed down late Friday evening, de Moraes instructed the country’s National Telecommunications Agency to block access to social media website X within 24 hours.
On Brazilian Justice de Moreas's order shutting down X:
The text of his 51-page decision is far more concerning and sweeping than the headlines suggest.
de Moreas’s own words make clear that he is attempting to strike a broader blow against free speech and in favor of…
— Brendan Carr (@BrendanCarrFCC) August 31, 2024
X had already announced on August 17 that it was shutting down its offices in the country to protect staffers from de Moraes’s wrath. At the same time, the company said that Brazilians could still download the app.
In his ruling, de Moraes demanded that Apple and Google remove X from their app stores within five days. He also imposed a daily fine of up to approximately $8,800 on persons and companies that attempt to use it via a VPN address.
𝕏 is the most used news source in Brazil. It is what the people want.
Now, the tyrant de Voldemort is crushing the people’s right to free speech. https://t.co/gR8aq3JzzU
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 31, 2024
The dictatorial decision comes amid a months-long legal dispute between de Moraes and X, which has refused to comply with what the company has deemed “illegal orders to censor his political opponents.”
The oppressive regime in Brazil is so afraid of the people learning the truth that they will bankrupt anyone who tries https://t.co/VgYPRJMXJv
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 30, 2024
Socialist Brazilian president Lula da Silva said in a radio interview Friday, “Just because the guy [Musk] has a lot of money, doesn’t mean they can disrespect you. … Who does he think he is?”
Musk has taken a no holds barred approach to the lawsuit. At various times over the past six months, he has called de Moraes a “tyrant,” “dictator,” and worse.
We willl begin publishing the long list of @Alexandre’s crimes, along with the specific Brazilian laws that he broke tomorrow.
Obviously, he does not need to abide by US law, but he does need to abide by his own country’s laws.
He is a dictator and a fraud, not a justice. https://t.co/m93B1r0v98
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 31, 2024
De Moraes took office as president of Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court (TSE) in March 2022 when he began to exert pressure on social media accounts supportive of conservative incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro in the lead-up to the presidential election.
Investigative journalist and author Michael Shellenberger, who broke the story about de Moraes’s apparent election interference, said his censorship efforts are “an attack on the democratic process” and “if there ever is electoral fraud in Brazil, nobody will be allowed to talk about it, if de Moraes gets his way.”
Shellenberger commented on the ban on X Saturday morning.
Exactly https://t.co/SpcCp7j5Cd
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 31, 2024
The spat between Musk and de Moraes began in April, when Musk announced that he tried to force the platform to censor accounts via a court order. Musk defiantly said that he would not give in to the demands and called for the impeachment of the high-ranking judge, referring to him as “Brazil’s Darth Vader.” The feud has also resulted in the freezing of financial accounts of Musk’s internet provider Starlink in Brazil.
Soon, we expect Judge Alexandre de Moraes will order X to be shut down in Brazil – simply because we would not comply with his illegal orders to censor his political opponents. These enemies include a duly elected Senator and a 16-year-old girl, among others.
When we attempted…
— Global Government Affairs (@GlobalAffairs) August 29, 2024
During a U.S. congressional hearing held in May, Shellenberger and Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski testified about the numerous anti-free speech policies that have been enacted in Brazil under Lula and de Moraes, whom one witness described as the “de facto dictator” of the country.
De Moraes’s disturbing decision comes as Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov was indicted in France on seemingly questionable charges that many have argued are entirely politically driven. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has remained largely undisturbed by lawsuits from Western governments.
Business
Is Government Inflation Reporting Accurate?

David Clinton
Who ya gonna believe: official CPI figures or your lyin’ eyes?
Great news! We’ve brought inflation back under control and stuff is now only costing you 2.4 percent more than it did last year!
That’s more or less the message we’ve been hearing from governments over the past couple of years. And in fact, the official Statistics Canada consumer price index (CPI) numbers do show us that the “all-items” index in 2024 was only 2.4 percent higher than in 2023. Fantastic.
So why doesn’t it feel fantastic?
Well statistics are funny that way. When you’ve got lots of numbers, there are all kinds of ways to dress ‘em up before presenting them as an index (or chart). And there really is no one combination of adjustments and corrections that’s definitively “right”. So I’m sure Statistics Canada isn’t trying to misrepresent things.
But I’m also curious to test whether the CPI is truly representative of Canadians’ real financial experiences. My first attempt to create my own alternative “consumer price index”, involved Statistics Canada’s “Detailed household final consumption expenditure”. That table contains actual dollar figures for nation-wide spending on a wide range of consumer items. To represent the costs Canadian’s face when shopping for basics, I selected these nine categories:
- Food and non-alcoholic beverages
- Clothing and footwear
- Housing, water, electricity, gas and other fuels
- Major household appliances
- Pharmaceutical products and other medical products (except cannabis)
- Transport
- Communications
- University education
- Property insurance
I then took the fourth quarter (Q4) numbers for each of those categories for all the years between 2013 and 2024 and divided them by the total population of the country for each year. That gave me an accurate picture of per capita spending on core cost-of-living items.
Overall, living and breathing through Q4 2013 would have cost the average Canadian $4,356.38 (or $17,425.52 for a full year). Spending for those same categories in Q4 2024, however, cost us $6,266.48 – a 43.85 percent increase.
By contrast, the official CPI over those years rose only 31.03 percent. That’s quite the difference. Here’s how the year-over-year changes in CPI inflation vs actual spending inflation compare:
As you can see, with the exception of 2020 (when COVID left us with nothing to buy), the official inflation number was consistently and significantly lower than actual spending. And, in the case of 2021, it was more than double.
Since 2023, the items with the largest price growth were university education (57.46 percent), major household appliances (52.67 percent), and housing, water, electricity, gas, and other fuels (50.79).
Having said all that, you could justifiably argue that the true cost of living hasn’t really gone up that much, but that at least part of the increase in spending is due to a growing taste for luxury items and high volume consumption. I can’t put a precise number on that influence, but I suspect it’s not trivial.
Since data on spending doesn’t seem to be the best measure of inflation, perhaps I could build my own basket of costs and compare those numbers to the official CPI. To do that, I collected average monthly costs for gasoline, home rentals, a selection of 14 core grocery items, and taxes paid by the average Canadian homeowner.¹ I calculated the tax burden (federal, provincial, property, and consumption) using the average of the estimates of two AI models.
How did the inflation represented by my custom basket compare with the official CPI? Well between 2017 and 2024, the Statistics Canada’s CPI grew by 23.39 percent. Over that same time, the monthly cost of my basket grew from $4,514.74 to $5,665.18; a difference of 25.48 percent. That’s not nearly as dramatic a difference as we saw when we measured spending, but it’s not negligible either.
The very fact that the government makes all this data freely available to us is evidence that they’re not out to hide the truth. But it can’t hurt to keep an active and independent eye on them, too.
Subscribe to The Audit.
For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
2025 Federal Election
Carney’s Hidden Climate Finance Agenda

From Energy Now
By Tammy Nemeth and Ron Wallace
It is high time that Canadians discuss and understand Mark Carney’s avowed plan to re-align capital with global Net Zero goals.
Mark Carney’s economic vision for Canada, one that spans energy, housing and defence, rests on an unspoken, largely undisclosed, linchpin: Climate Finance – one that promises a Net Zero future for Canada but which masks a radical economic overhaul.
Regrettably, Carney’s potential approach to a Net Zero future remains largely unexamined in this election. As the former chair of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), Carney has proposed new policies, offices, agencies, and bureaus required to achieve these goals.. Pieced together from his presentations, discussions, testimonies and book, Carney’s approach to climate finance appears to have four pillars: mandatory climate disclosures, mandatory transition plans, centralized data sharing via the United Nations’ Net Zero Data Public Utility (NZDPU) and compliance with voluntary carbon markets (VCMs). There are serious issues for Canada’s economy if these principles were to form the core values for policies under a potential Liberal government.
About the first pillar Carney has been unequivocal: “Achieving net zero requires a whole economy transition.” This would require a restructuring energy and financial systems to shift away from fossil fuels to renewable energy with Carney insisting repeatedly in his book that “every financial [and business] decision takes climate change into account.” Climate finance, unlike broader sustainable finance with its Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) focus would channel capital into sectors aligned with a 2050 Net Zero trajectory. Carney states: “Companies, and those who invest in them…who are part of the solution, will be rewarded. Those lagging behind…will be punished.” In other words, capital would flow to compliant firms but be withheld from so-called “high emitters”.
How will investors, banks and insurers distinguish solution from problem? Mandatory climate disclosures, aligned with the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB), would compel firms to report emissions and outline their Net Zero strategies. Canada’s Sustainability Standards Board has adopted these methodologies, despite concerns they would disadvantage Canadian businesses. Here, Carney repeatedly emphasizes disclosures as the cornerstone to track emissions data required to shift capital away from “high emitters”. Without this, he claims, large institutional investors lack the data on supply chains to make informed decisions to shift capital to businesses that are Net Zero compliant.
The second pillar, Mandatory Transition Plans would require companies to map a 2050 Net Zero trajectory for emission reduction targets. Failure to meet those targets would invite pressure from investors, banks, or activists, who may pursue litigation for non-compliance. The UK’s Transition Plan Task Force, now part of ISSB, provides this standardized framework. Carney, while at GFANZ, advocated using transition plans for a “managed phase-out” of high-emitting assets like coal, oil and gas, not just through divestment but by financing emissions reductions. “As part of their transition planning, [GFANZ] members should establish and apply financing policies to phase out and align carbon-intensive sectors and activities, such as thermal coal, oil and gas and deforestation, not only through asset divestment but also through transition finance that reduces real world emissions. To assist with these efforts GFANZ will continue to develop and implement a framework for the Managed Phase-out of high-emitting assets.” Clearly, the purpose of this is to ensure companies either decarbonize or face capital withdrawal.
The third pillar is the United Nations’ Net Zero Data Public Utility (NZDPU), a centralized platform for emissions and transition data. Carney insists these data be freely accessible, enabling investors, banks and insurers to judge companies’ progress to Net Zero. As Carney noted in 2021: “Private finance is judging…banks, pension funds and asset managers have to show where they are in the transition to Net Zero.” Hence, compliant firms would receive investment; laggards would face divestment.
Finally, voluntary carbon markets (VCMs) allow companies to offset emissions by purchasing credits from projects like reforestation. Carney, who launched the Taskforce on Scaling VCMs in 2020, has insisted on monitoring, verification and lifecycle tracking. At a 2024 Beijing conference, he suggested major jurisdictions could establish VCMs by COP 30 (planned for 2025 in Brazil) to create a global market. If Canada mandates VCMs, businesses especially small and medium enterprises (SMEs) would face much higher compliance costs with credits available only to those that demonstrate progress with transition plans.
These potential mandatory disclosures and transition plans would burden Canadian businesses with material costs and legal risks that constitute an economic gamble which few may recognize but all should weigh. Do Canadians truly want a government that has an undisclosed climate finance agenda that would be subservient to an opaque globalized Net Zero agenda?
Tammy Nemeth is a U.K.-based strategic energy analyst. Ron Wallace is an executive fellow of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute and the Canada West Foundation.
-
Business1 day ago
Trump: China’s tariffs to “come down substantially” after negotiations with Xi
-
2025 Federal Election2 days ago
Mark Carney Wants You to Forget He Clearly Opposes the Development and Export of Canada’s Natural Resources
-
Business1 day ago
Trump considers $5K bonus for moms to increase birthrate
-
Business2 days ago
Hudson’s Bay Bid Raises Red Flags Over Foreign Influence
-
2025 Federal Election2 days ago
Canada’s pipeline builders ready to get to work
-
2025 Federal Election1 day ago
Police Associations Endorse Conservatives. Poilievre Will Shut Down Tent Cities
-
Business1 day ago
Chinese firm unveils palm-based biometric ID payments, sparking fresh privacy concerns
-
2025 Federal Election2 days ago
Canada’s press tries to turn the gender debate into a non-issue, pretend it’s not happening