What's the best starting item?
Tomorrow's Newspaper, it cuts out on a number of the upgrades you need to buy early letting you reach major powers spikes a lot earlier. For example without it to reach 4-2 commanders you need to buy every 1 and 2 cost upgrade, meanwhile with Tomorrow's Newspaper you only really need to buy the 1 cost upgrades and the 2 cost upgrades for increasing evacuation/extermination times, allowing you to deploy your first 4-2 several days earlier. It lets you hyper focus on getting the important upgrades like Networked Consciousness, and once you have those upgrades and all the evacuation/extermination upgrades you basically don't need to bother with upgrades at all and can funnel all your EE into powerful Commanders as the remaining upgrades are just commander upgrades that you can hold off on until you need to grab the Final Battle upgrades and Imago Quickening (as with Tomorrow's Newspaper even with relatively unskilled play you should be ready for the Final Battle well before Day 50).
Though after Tomorrow's Newspaper I would say the single use items are the second best as a free unconditional T2 Break every loop is pretty useful, though considering you still need to build up trauma for the +5 EE generation it's a bit less useful than the upgrade skipping of Tomorrow's Newspaper.
Unicorn Lard is third best, but only really cause the rest suck, as Lard only really has any use in the early loops for forcing Chosen to arrive earlier, and for building up extra EE in the latter days where you already have T2 EE production and are just waiting for upgrades to set up an Orgy and T3 Breaks. However this is only an early loop benefit as in later loops you'll be able to open up loops with heavy enough attacks to force Chosen to appear early anyways, and the loops are too short with far too high trauma resolution to be able to afford skipping days.
Inferno Pepper I'd say is fourth best, in the early loops the amount of EE you get is pretty inconsequential so you wont be all that much stronger for it, and if you're late enough in the loops for it to be giving a decent amount of EE you're probably good enough at the game that even without it you probably aren't all that worried about EE generation. At best in early loops it enables the interesting strategy of using 1 cost commands since they're effectively free with Inferno Pepper, but that's really a scrapping the bottom of the barrel strategy compared to Newspaper, the consumables, and Lard. Though it's at least comparatively better than Inevitability.
Now last and certainly least, Inevitability. The extra damage can be nice in the middle days of the early loops when you have T2 Breaks and max EE generation and are just waiting for upgrades to get an Orgy/T3 Breaks, as it lets you get surrounds where you otherwise wouldn't like getting surrounds on the third Chosen, but most of the time this is relatively inconsequential extra damage. Though sometimes you can use this to get an early orgy and T3 Break. Though like Lard's early usefulness in forcing Chosen to appear early, the damage from Inevitability falls out of usefulness in latter loops where you have enough damage output that Inevitability is wasteful overkill.