Sunday, June 8, 2025

Different parties, same dopium: The Trump administration might get less blow back from these immigration raids if they tried just a little bit to appear less like Joe Biden's fascist police state

Acquitted pro-life activist Mark Houck reveals details of ‘reckless’ FBI raid; will press charges

... There were “at least 10, 15 marked and unmarked units right in front of me. Surrounding the side of my house, I have 100 yards to the street, cars lined all the way up to the street, long guns pointed at me, heavily armored vests, ballistic helmets, ballistic shields, a battering ram,” he said.

He said his daughter “took note” of an FBI agent in the back of the house, and there were at least five federal agents on his porch “with M-16s pointed at me and now my wife as she entered the opening of the door.” ...

 

 Agents Use Military-Style Force Against Protesters at L.A. Immigration Raid

... The raid at the clothing wholesaler began about 9:15 a.m. in the Fashion District, less than two miles from Los Angeles City Hall.

It was an extraordinary show of force. Dozens of federal agents wearing helmets and green camouflage arrived in two hulking armored trucks and other unmarked vehicles, and were soon approached by a crowd of immigrant activists and supporters. Some agents carried riot shields and others held rifles, as well as shotguns that appeared to be loaded with less-than-lethal ammunition. ...

Saturday, June 7, 2025

An AI-induced economic collapse is coming in one to five years on the heels of millions losing their jobs to AI and on the spending of those millions drying up

 The silent bloodbath that's tearing through the middle-class and rapidly flipping the US economy on its head

... This time, it's not blue-collar and factory workers getting whacked — it's college graduates with white-collar jobs in tech, finance, law, and consulting.

Entry-level jobs are vanishing the fastest — stoking fears of recession and a generation of disillusioned graduates left stranded with CVs no one wants.

College grads are now much more likely to be unemployed than others, official data show.

Chatbots have already taken over data entry and customer service jobs. Next-generation 'agentic' AI can solve problems, adapt, and work independently. ...

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, one of the world's most powerful AI firms, says we're at the start of a storm.

AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs — and spike unemployment to 10-20 percent in the next one to five years, he told Axios. ...

Critics say universities are churning out graduates into a market that simply doesn't need them.

A growing number of young professionals say they feel betrayed — promised opportunity, but handed a future of 'AI-enhanced' redundancy. ...

 

Well, if spending collapses those blue-collar and factory workers won't have anything to do either, now will they?

Prices for everything might very well reset much lower in a deflationary spiral.

Imagining being in charge of addressing all that.

Trump has cut only 59k federal jobs since January, through May lol

 


Trump ICE arrests: 100k in 20 weeks

 At this rate Trump will arrest just over 1 million illegals in four years, that's it.

If ICE could sustain 2,000 arrests a day from here on out, 2.6 million would be the total, out of many millions more claimed to be in the country illegally.

As with DOGE, campaign promises are easier to make than they are to keep.

ICE arrests under Trump top 100,000 as officials expand aggressive efforts to detain migrants

 Arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement during President Trump's second term topped 100,000 this week, as federal agents intensified efforts to detain unauthorized immigrants in courthouses, worksites and communities across the U.S., internal government data obtained by CBS News shows.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, ICE recorded more than 2,000 arrests each day, a dramatic increase from the daily average of 660 arrests reported by the agency during Mr. Trump's first 100 days back at the White House, the federal statistics show. During President Biden's last year in office, ICE averaged roughly 300 daily arrests, according to agency data.

The latest numbers show ICE is getting closer to meeting the far-reaching demands of top administration officials like White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, an immigration hardliner who has forcefully pushed the agency to conduct "a minimum" of 3,000 arrests each day. 

On Thursday morning, ICE was holding around 54,000 immigrant detainees in detention facilities across the country, according to the data. The Trump administration is asking Congress to give ICE billions of dollars in extra funds to hire thousands of additional deportation officers and expand detention capacity to hold 100,000 individuals at any given point. Officials are also looking at converting facilities inside military bases into immigration detention centers. ...

In 2025 you gotta be a $33 million millionaire to be a real millionaire



Friday, June 6, 2025

Pizza chains struggle because low income consumers can no longer afford prices up 30% since 2019

 Bloomberg reports here.

 


 

Supreme Court votes 6-3 to allow DOGE access to Social Security data as litigation in the case continues

 

 
... The unsigned order said that members of the DOGE team assigned to the Social Security Administration should have “access to the agency records in question in order for those members to do their work.” ...

U.S. District Judge Ellen Hollander had ruled that DOGE had no need to access the specific data at issue. The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Richmond, Virginia, declined to block Hollander’s decision, leading to the Trump administration to file its emergency request at the Supreme Court. ...

Trump's DOJ brings Kilmar Abrego Garcia back from El Salvador to face a slew of criminal charges it has cooked up against him in the interim since the Supremes ordered him returned in April

 

Watch out, Elon, you may be next.

 Kilmar Abrego Garcia returns to face immigrant smuggling charges after wrongful deportation

Kilmar Abrego Garcia was returned to the United States to face criminal charges involving an alleged undocumented immigrant smuggling ring Friday, months after the Maryland resident was wrongfully deported to a prison in his native El Salvador. ...

The indictment alleges that Abrego Garcia and others from 2016 through 2025 “conspired to bring undocumented aliens to the United States from countries such as Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Ecuador, and elsewhere, ultimately passing through Mexico before crossing into Texas.”

The grand jury that issued the indictment found that he made more than 100 trips smuggling thousands of immigrants. ...

In a post on X on Friday, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele wrote, “As I said in the Oval Office:1. I would never smuggle a terrorist into the United States. 2. ⁠I would never release a gang member onto the streets of El Salvador.”

“That said, we work with the Trump administration, and if they request the return of a gang member to face charges, of course we wouldn’t refuse,” Bukele wrote. ...


 

 

 

The Donald Trump/Rush Limbaugh Dumb Ass Unemployment Rate in May 2025 climbed for a second consecutive month to 37.7%

 103.2 million eating, but not working.


 

Average US Treasury yields climbed all across the curve in May 2025

Bills 4.28
Notes 4.096
Bonds 4.91
Aggregate 4.31 

Average Bond yields climbed for a second consecutive month.

The Daily Federal Funds Rate averaged 4.33.

 


Just 49.35% had a full time job in May 2025

 


Thursday, June 5, 2025

Traffic through the Suez Canal to and from the Red Sea remains down 60%, Egypt is losing billions of dollars on transits still rerouted around the southern tip of Africa

 The New York Times reports here:

... The cease-fire, which began May 6, ended a U.S. campaign that involved over 1,100 strikes against the Houthis in Yemen and became a source of embarrassment for the Trump administration after group chats about the strikes inadvertently became public. The Pentagon had planned on a monthslong bombardment, but President Trump ended it after about 50 days.

“If the intention was to restore freedom of navigation, which is what they stated it was, then the results speak for themselves: The shipping industry has not gone back,” said Richard Meade, editor in chief of Lloyd’s List, a shipping publication. ...

 

American inability to guarantee freedom of the seas is a serious turning point for the world.

It took only a few months of intense familiarity for Elon Musk to develop his complete contempt for Donald Trump and Capitol Hill

 Elon made his Oval Office farewell just six days ago, and now look at them.

Elon is an exceptionally accomplished person in the auto industry, the communications industry, and the space industry. He's not a perfect man by any stretch of the imagination, but he stands head and shoulders above the puny little rejects of the political class, a bunch of climbers whose sole ambition in life is to control the $7.2 trillion in its hands this particular fiscal year. That must have been pretty boring to be around, and frankly beneath him.

 




Not your daddy's Republican Party

 


New RAM CEO admits retiring the V-8 Hemi engine for RAM 1500 truck was a mistake, brings it back this summer

 

... Ram CEO Tim Kuniskis, who unretired from the automaker late last year, admitted the decision to cancel the Hemi engine for its popular consumer-focused Ram 1500 was a mistake.

“Everyone makes mistakes, but how you handle them defines you. Ram screwed up when we dropped the Hemi — we own it and we fixed it,” Kuniskis said. “We’re not just bringing back a legendary V-8 engine, we’re igniting an assertive product plan and expanding the freedom of choice in powertrain for our customers.” ...

Ram’s sales have been struggling for years amid price increases and production mishaps, as well as the automaker killing off the Hemi engine — a staple of the automaker and its predecessors since the 1950s. ...

More.

The Republican claim that the Big Beautiful Bill's cuts to Medicaid coverage will be offset by enrollments in employer-provided health insurance is a bad joke

The enrollment rate in employer provided health insurance is down four points 2008-2021, from 54% to 48%.

Why?

Costs.

The average premium for a health insurance plan from an employer was 36% higher in 2021 than the inflation adjusted premium from 2008 should have been. The 2008 premium of $4,386 should have been $5,446 in 2021. Instead it was $7,380.

People can't afford this insurance.

Meanwhile their out of pocket cost for it increased 86% over the period, while their deductibles shot up 131%.

Government mandated health insurance, Obamacare, has been a disaster for workers who have voted with their feet against it because they can't afford it and benefit little from it, swelling Medicaid enrollments in desperation.

Republicans promised to fix this in 2017 and failed.

Now they're saying, Let Them Eat Cake.

 


 

 

 

Wednesday, June 4, 2025

Mad King Ludwig's soul is in chaos, full of conflicting desires which he is utterly unable to satisfy: Trump now calls for letting Congress spend without limit weeks after touting tax increases on the rich to pay the bills

 Trump calls for scrapping debt limit  (June 4)

Trump pushes Republicans to have rich pay more taxes (May 8)

Trump pivots, says GOP should ‘probably not’ raise taxes on rich  (May 9)

Trump millionaire tax hike idea upends Republican political wisdom (May 10)

He belongs in a psych ward, not in The White House.

 

Emmanuel Todd: The Trump "revolution" is a mixture of reason and nihilism headed toward decadence in a nation now missing the strengths of both ethnic cohesion and Protestant faith

 This is the full text of La révolution Trump by Emmanuel Todd in "From Russia With Love", translated by Arnaud Bertrand:

The Trump Revolution 

I would like to try to understand the immediate cause of the Trump Revolution. Every revolution has primarily endogenous causes; it is first and foremost the outcome of internal dynamics and contradictions within the society concerned. However, one striking thing in history is the frequency with which revolutions are triggered by military defeats. The Russian revolution of 1905 was preceded by a military defeat against Japan. The Russian revolution of 1917 was preceded by a defeat against Germany. The German revolution of 1918 was also preceded by a defeat. Even the French Revolution, which seems more endogenous, had been preceded in 1763 by France's defeat in the Seven Years' War, a major defeat since the Ancien Régime lost all its colonies. The collapse of the Soviet system was also triggered by a double defeat: in the arms race with the United States and by the retreat from Afghanistan. I believe we must start from this notion of a defeat that brings about a revolution to understand the Trump revolution. The experience currently underway in the United States, even if we don't know exactly what it will be, is a revolution. Is it a revolution in the strict sense? Is it a counter-revolution? It is in any case a phenomenon of extraordinary violence, a violence that turns on one hand against the allied-subjects, the Europeans, the Ukrainians, but which expresses itself on the other hand, internally, in American society, through a struggle against universities, against gender theory, against scientific culture, against the policy of including Blacks in the American middle classes, against free trade and against immigration. This revolutionary violence is, in my opinion, linked to defeat. Various people have reported to me conversations between members of the Trump team and what is striking is their awareness of defeat. People like J.D. Vance, the vice president, and many others, are people who have understood that America had lost this war. For the United States, it was fundamentally an economic defeat. The sanctions policy showed that the financial power of the West was not an all-power. The Americans had the revelation of the fragility of their military industry. People at the Pentagon know very well that one of the limits to their action is the limited capacity of the American military-industrial complex. This American awareness of defeat contrasts with the non-awareness of Europeans. Europeans did not organize the war. Because they did not organize the war, they cannot have full awareness of defeat. To have full awareness of defeat, they would need access to Pentagon thinking. But Europeans do not have access to it. Europeans therefore situate themselves mentally before the defeat while the current American administration situates itself mentally after the defeat.  

 

Defeat and Cultural Crisis 

My experience of the fall of communism taught me, as I have said, something important: the collapse of a system is mental as much as economic. What is collapsing in the current West, and first in the United States, is not only economic dominance, but also the belief system that animated it or was superimposed on it. The beliefs that accompanied Western triumphalism are collapsing. But as in any revolutionary process, we do not yet know which new belief is the most important, which is the belief that will emerge victorious from the process of decomposition.

 

The Reasonable in the Trump Administration 

I want to clarify that I had no principled hostility toward Trump at the start. During Trump's first election, in 2016, I was among those who admitted that America was sick, that its industrial and working heart was being destroyed, that ordinary Americans were suffering from the general policy of the Empire and that there were very good reasons for many voters to vote for Trump. In Trump's intuitions, there are very reasonable things. Trump's protectionism, the idea that America must be protected to rebuild its industry, results from a very reasonable intuition. I am myself a protectionist. I wrote books about it long ago. I also consider that the idea of immigration control is reasonable, even if the style adopted by the Trump administration in managing immigration is unbearably violent. Another reasonable element, which surprises many Westerners, is the Trump administration's insistence on saying that there are only two sexes in humanity, men and women. I do not see there a rapprochement with Vladimir Putin's Russia but a return to the ordinary conception of humanity that has existed since the appearance of Homo sapiens, a biological evidence on which, moreover, science and the Church agree. There is reasonableness in the Trump revolution.

 

Nihilism in the Trump Revolution 

I must now say why, despite the presence of these reasonable elements, I am pessimistic and why I think the Trump experience will fail. I will recall why I was optimistic for Russia from 2002 and why I am pessimistic for the United States in 2025. There is in the behavior of the Trump administration, a deficit of thought, an unpreparedness, a brutality, an impulsive, unreflective behavior, which evokes the central concept of The Defeat of the West, that of nihilism. I explain in The Defeat of the West, that religious emptiness, the zero stage of religion, leads to anguish rather than to a state of freedom and well-being. The zero state brings us back to the fundamental problem. What is it to be a man? What is the meaning of things? A classic response to these questions, in a phase of religious collapse, is nihilism. We pass from the anguish of emptiness to the deification of emptiness, a deification of emptiness that can lead to a will to destroy things, men, and ultimately reality. Transgender ideology is not in itself something serious on the moral level but it is fundamental on the intellectual level because saying that a man can become a woman or a woman a man reveals a will to destroy reality. This was, in association with cancel culture, with the preference for war, an element of the nihilism that predominated under the Biden administration. Trump rejects all that. However, what strikes me currently is the emergence of a nihilism that takes other forms: a will to destroy science and the university, black middle classes, or disordered violence in the application of American protectionist strategy. When, without thinking, Trump wants to establish customs duties between Canada and the United States, while the Great Lakes region constitutes a single industrial system, I see there a destructive impulse as much as protection. When I see Trump suddenly establishing protectionist tariffs against China while forgetting that the majority of American smartphones are manufactured in China, I tell myself that we cannot be content to consider this as stupidity. It is stupidity certainly, but it is perhaps also nihilism. Let us move to a higher moral level: the Trumpian fantasy of transforming Gaza, emptied of its population, into a tourist resort is typically a high-intensity nihilist project. The fundamental contradiction of American policy, however, I will look for it on the side of protectionism. The theory of protectionism tells us that protection can only work if a country possesses the qualified population that would allow it to profit from tariff protections. A protectionist policy will only be effective if you have engineers, scientists, qualified technicians. Which Americans do not have in sufficient numbers. Now I see the United States beginning to hunt down their Chinese students, and so many others, those very ones who allow them to compensate for their deficit in engineers and scientists. This is absurd. The theory of protectionism also tells us that protection can only launch or relaunch industry if the State intervenes to participate in the construction of new industries. Now we see the Trump administration attacking the State, this State that should nourish scientific research and technological progress. Worse: if we look for the motivation of the struggle against the federal state led by Elon Musk and others, we realize that it is not even economic. Those who are familiar with American history know the capital role of the federal State in the emancipation of Blacks. Hatred of the federal state, in the United States, most often derives from anti-Black resentment. When one fights against the American federal State, one fights against the central administrations that have emancipated and that protect Blacks. A high proportion of black middle classes has found jobs in the federal administration. The struggle against the federal State therefore does not integrate into a general conception of economic and national reconstruction. If I think of the multiple and contradictory acts of the Trump administration, the word that comes to mind is dislocation. A dislocation whose direction we do not know very well.

 

Absolute Nuclear Family + Zero Religion = Atomization 

I am very pessimistic for the United States. I will return, to conclude this exploratory conference, to my fundamental concepts as historian and anthropologist. I said at the beginning of this conference that the fundamental reason why I had believed, quite early, from 2002, in a return of Russia to stability, is because I was aware of the existence of a communitarian anthropological foundation in Russia. Unlike many, I do not need hypotheses about the state of religion in Russia to understand Russia's return to stability. I see a family, community culture, with its values of authority and equality, which moreover allows us to understand a little what the nation is in the Russian mind. There is indeed a relationship between the form of the family and the idea one has of the nation. To the community family corresponds a strong, compact idea of the nation or people. Such is Russia. In the case of the United States, as in that of England, we are in the inverse case. The model of the English and American family is nuclear, individualist, without even including a precise rule of inheritance. Freedom of will reigns. The Anglo-American absolute nuclear family is very little structuring for the nation. The absolute nuclear family certainly has an advantage of flexibility. Generations succeed each other by separating. The speed of adaptation of the United States or England, the plasticity of their social structures (which allowed the English industrial revolution and American takeoff) largely result from this absolute nuclear family structure. But beside or above this individualist family structure there was in England as in the United States the discipline of Protestant religion, with its potential for social cohesion. Religion, as a structuring factor, was capital for the Anglo-American world. It has disappeared. The zero state of religion, combined with very little structuring family values does not seem to me an anthropological and historical combination that could lead to stability. It is toward ever greater atomization that the Anglo-American world is heading. This atomization can only lead to an accentuation, without visible limit, of American decadence. I hope I am wrong, I hope I have forgotten an important positive factor. I unfortunately now find only one additional negative factor, which appeared to me when reading a book by Amy Chua, a university professor at Yale who was J.D. Vance's mentor. Political Tribes. Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations (2018) underlines, after many other texts, the unique character of the American nation: a civic nation, founded by the adherence of all successive immigrants to political values transcending ethnicity. Certainly. This was very early the official theory. But there was also in the United States a dominant white Protestant group, itself derived from a rather long and quite ethnic history at bottom. This American nation has become, since the pulverization of the Protestant group, really post-ethnic, a purely "civic" nation, in theory united by attachment to its constitution, to its values. Amy Chua's fear is that of a reversion of America to what she calls tribalism. A regressive pulverization. Each of the European nations is fundamentally, whatever its family structure, its religious tradition, its vision of itself, an ethnic nation, in the sense of a people attached to a land, with its language, its culture, a people anchored in history. Each has a stable foundation. Russians have that, Germans have that, the French have that, even if they are a bit bizarre at the moment on these concepts. America no longer has that. A civic nation? Beyond the idea, the reality of an American civic nation but deprived of morality by the zero state of religion leaves one dreaming. It even gives one chills. My personal fear is that we are, not at all at the end, but only at the beginning of a fall of the United States that will reveal to us things that we cannot even imagine. The threat is there: even more than in an American empire, whether triumphant, or weakened, or destroyed, going toward things that we cannot imagine.

This is a link to the original text (in French: emmanueltodd.substack.com/p/bons-baisers) which is actually much longer than this, as it touches on more topics than the "Trump revolution".

I disagree with the premise that the United States has been defeated and that the Trump "revolution" is the result, but I do not doubt that she is in danger of defeat. Todd's other observations are salutary.

Such defeats as we have experienced have resulted from a failure of the will, primarily of the will to pay the financial costs of maintaining American leadership in the world. This failure of the will traces to the 1960s liberal social revolution, but was made bipartisan and supercharged as conservatism by the libertarian success of the Reagan Revolution in defeating the necessary role played by high ordinary income tax rates in the United States to fund it.

The word "tax" has been a four-letter word to Republicans ever since. But it is a myth that the taxpayers know best what to do with their money. The rich have hollowed out the country's capital strength and call it the land of opportunity. We have little to show for it since 1986.

The Trump revolution, for all its will to power, which is its main attraction in a country devoid of will, also refuses to pay, which is why it is not a true revolution and will not endure. The tax cut revolution of 1986 is not repeatable. That Trump would raise taxes on the rich to pay for his big, beautiful bill tells you that he knows what must be done, but as with immigration, he is a paper tiger and is not up to it. Trump is not the man demanded by the times, however much millions hope otherwise. He remains but a transitional figure.

Ye cannot serve God and Mammon.


 

Interest on the national debt has to be paid out of current tax receipts, crowding out other spending

 Defense department spending in fiscal 2025 is estimated to clock in at $873 billion.


Burning cargo ship bound for Mexico from China with 800 electric vehicles on board abandoned off the coast of Alaska lol


 

... Fires across all vessel segments hit the highest level in a decade in 2024, according to insurer Allianz Commercial. ...

More.

Gee, I wonder why.

Don't park one in your garage.

Tuesday, June 3, 2025

Tesla sales must be worse than we thought

 

Ah, so the State Department's Darren Beattie married a Russkie

Good to know!

 


Low-inertia renewable energy systems are prone to blackouts such as in Spain in April because they cannot maintain stable frequencies in the absence of high-inertia fossil fuel, hydro, and nuclear energy systems

 The Physics Behind the Spanish Blackout: Madrid knew solar and wind power were unreliable but pressed ahead anyway.

When a grid failure plunged 55 million people in Spain and Portugal into darkness at the end of April, it should have been a wake-up call on green energy. Climate activists promised that solar and wind power were the future of cheap, dependable electricity. The massive half-day blackout shows otherwise. The nature of solar and wind generation makes grids that rely on them more prone to collapse—an issue that’s particularly expensive to ameliorate. ...

Grids need to stay on a very stable frequency—generally 50 Hertz in Europe—or else you get blackouts. Fossil-fuel, hydro and nuclear generation all solve this problem naturally because they generate energy by powering massive spinning turbines. The inertia of these heavy rotating masses resists changes in speed and hence frequency, so that when sudden demand swings would otherwise drop or hike grid frequency, the turbines work as immense buffers. But wind and solar don’t power such heavy turbines to generate energy. It’s possible to make up for this with cutting-edge technology such as advanced inverters or synthetic inertia. But many solar and wind farms haven’t undergone these expensive upgrades. If a grid dominated by those two power sources gets off frequency, a blackout is more likely than in a system that relies on other energy sources. ...

Just a week prior to the blackout, Spain bragged that for the first time, renewables delivered 100% of its electricity, though only for a period of minutes around 11:15 a.m. When it collapsed, the Iberian grid was powered by 74% renewable energy, with 55% coming from solar. It went down under the bright noon sun. When the Iberian grid frequency started faltering on April 28, the grid’s high proportion of solar and wind generation couldn’t stabilize it. This isn’t speculation; it’s physics. As the electricity supply across Spain collapsed, Portugal was pulled along, because the two countries are tightly interconnected through the Iberian electricity network. ...

TACO Trump strikes again

 Trump always chickens out, aka paper tiger, etc.

 Social Security recipients do not need to worry about their benefits being garnished due to their defaulted student loans, at least for now. The development is an abrupt change in policy by the administration, which had announced in April that it would be resuming collection activity on defaulted student loan borrowers. The Education Dept. had said that Social Security benefit offsets could begin as early as June.

(June 3) Deutsche Bank raises S&P 500 forecast on ‘TACO’ theory: ‘We will get further relents’

(May 29) 10 times Trump has threatened, then backtracked on, tariffs as 'TACO trade' jab gains traction

(May 31) Trump Raises Steel Tariffs To 50%—Here Are The 21 Times He’s Changed His Mind

(May 28) Trump was asked about the "TACO" trade and called it a "nasty question." Here's what it means.

(The guy who started TACO May 2) The US market’s surprise comeback, and the rise of the ‘Taco’ trade theory

... the US administration does not have a very high tolerance for market and economic pressure, and will be quick to back off when tariffs cause pain. This is the Taco theory: Trump Always Chickens Out. ...     

(June 2):


 

Sunday, June 1, 2025

Ah, so Republican pinhead Joe Concha thinks a Democrat win in 2026 would be a loss lol

Joe Concha never really does get to his point in this column, but he does spread a lot of nincompoopery about like so much manure on a field.

This is the guy who masked himself and his kids while outdoors during COVID-19 because his wife is a doctor and told him he had to, which is very amusing given Joe's interest in Democrats' inability to "connect" with young men.

Joe Concha lives in an imaginary world of fanciful creation and takes his marching orders, repeating stupid.

Trump's mandate, for example, "the greatest verdict in history" he says, in 2024 was actually smaller than W's in 2004.

Even Jimmy Carter's was bigger in 1976 than Trump's was in 2024.

Core pce inflation released this past week came in at 2.52%, not 2.1% as Joe says. Joe wouldn't know core if he ate an apple.

Just 49.6% had full time jobs in April 2025 vs. 50.4% in April 2023, 0.8 points lower than two years ago.

Also two years ago, unemployment was 0.8 points lower at 3.4% than Joe Concha's current "historically low" level, again having touched a level under Joe Biden not seen since May 1969.

Joe stealing glory from Joe. Tut-tut.

Democrats may have had trouble connecting with young men in 2024, but the Biden administration really did drop the bigger ball of communicating its record of historically low unemployment. The Wall Street Journal trumpeted it for them in 2023, but you'd hardly remember the fact.

Meanwhile Joe Concha's "respected" GDPNow model got 1Q2025 GDP wrong by 2.4 points lol.

With an actual negative print now at -0.2% for the first quarter, the set-up for a dead cat bounce in 2Q would seem obvious.

But you never know with Trump in charge, and for my money you have to bet against Mr. Unpredictable. 

If Jonathan Swift were here, he might say that it is the Republicans who are led by a changeable female mind, not the Democrats, which may be why Joe Concha likes him so:

The current of a female mind stops thus,
and turns with ev'ry wind;
Thus whirling round, together draws
Fools, fops, and rakes, for chaff and straws.

 

 

Saturday, May 31, 2025

One of Elon Musk's DOGE wizards got the boot for finding that the government works and is not as inefficient as he was expecting

No good deed goes unpunished.

 

... “I would say the culture shock is mostly a lot of meetings, not a lot of decisions,” Lavingia told Fast Company in the piece, which also noted that he noticed the number of mission-driven people working in government. “But honestly, it’s kind of fine—because the government works. It’s not as inefficient as I was expecting, to be honest. I was hoping for more easy wins.” ...

More.

Friday, May 30, 2025

One of these days the parcel drones won't be carrying simply what they carry now, which will be a fateful turning point for this country

 


The core pce inflation rate in April 2025 at 2.52% year over year is still almost 65% higher than the 2008-2020 average at 1.53%

The rate was last lower than in April 2025 in March 2021 at 2.20% yoy, which is good news.

 


The customers, naturally

 After Trump order, who will pay to keep Michigan coal plant on life support? 

... While the details still remain unclear, utility customers will ultimately be the ones to pay it, they say. ...

The 1935 law Trump administration officials used to order the plant stay open — more commonly deployed for emergencies like hurricanes, wildfires or extreme heat — entitles Consumers to recover its expenses as it complies, according to Dan Scripps, chair of the Michigan Public Service Commission, which regulates utilities in the state. ...

The same day this story was published Consumer's Energy informed me my budget plan payment amount will rise by $48 monthly for the next year.

We are already paying.


Thursday, May 29, 2025

Today's so-called conservatives wish for a nation of executive orders, not a nation of laws

 

CNBC avoids the story like the plague: Real GDP for 1Q2025 was revised up to -0.2% from -0.3% in today's second estimate for 1Q

No one wants to talk about this. Crickets pretty much everywhere. CNBC had Rosie on to discuss, but there was no article.

 


These lunatics are their own worst enemies

 The guy with the common sense about the national debt who stands in the way of Trump's Big Beautiful Bill wants to re-litigate 9/11.


Two-weeks-Trump lets Putin string him along for six weeks



A prophet without honor in his own country is limited by Elon Musk

 


Trump lays tariff egg with new "Chicken Do"

 



Few people consider that the Great Depression of the 1930s was the unwind of the Great Inflation of WWI

 Economics is mean-reverting.

 


 

 

 

We've been liberated from Liberation Day by two Republicans (one appointed by Trump) and one Democrat on a court handpicked by Trump to adjudicate his tariffs lol

 

The U.S. Court of International Trade on Wednesday blocked steep reciprocal tariffs unilaterally imposed by President Donald Trump on scores of countries in April to correct what he said were persistent trade imbalances. ...

In its ruling, a three-judge panel on the Court of International Trade said that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which Trump invoked to impose the tariffs, does not authorize a president to levy universal duties on imports.
 
“The Worldwide and Retaliatory Tariff Orders exceed any authority granted to the President by IEEPA to regulate importation by means of tariffs,” the judges wrote.

And separate, specific tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China related to drug trafficking “fail because they do not deal with the threats set forth in those orders,” the panel wrote.

Implementing tariffs typically requires congressional approval.

But Trump chose to bypass Congress by declaring a national economic emergency under IEEPA, which became law in 1977, and then using the purported emergency as justification for cutting Congress out of the process.

The panel not only ordered a permanent halt to the tariffs at issue in the case, but it also barred any future modifications to them.

The Trump administration was given 10 days to make the necessary changes to carry out the judges’ orders. ...



 

Wednesday, May 28, 2025

Different parties, same hopium: In September 2012 Barack Obama accepted the Democrats' nomination saying Hope Needs More Time, now Trump says he needs another two weeks to see whether Putin really wants peace in Ukraine

Like Putin's record three-day bombardment of Ukraine last weekend wasn't an answer.

 



CNBC piles on Elon Musk with unfair story about latest test flight of Starship, which was hardly a setback

 

 
SpaceX saw its Starship system explode on Tuesday in a test flight, the third consecutive setback for Elon Musk’s rocket maker.
 
There's a far less biased presentation here:
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 

The lead actor in the sequel to the Grace Commission didn't realize it was just a show

 

 
... “I was, like, disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decrease it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,” Musk said in a clip the program shared on social media platform X. ... “I think a bill can be big or it could be beautiful, but I don’t know if it could be both,” Musk said in the clip. ...

In an interview with The Washington Post published Tuesday, Musk said that the federal bureaucracy is “much worse than I realized” and that DOGE became “the whipping boy for everything.”

Tuesday, May 27, 2025

At 65.6% in 2024, the homeownership rate in the United States matches the 1980 rate, which was an historical high water mark not exceeded until 1997

 For all the justified complaining about not being able to afford a home, the homeownership rate in 2024 is historically pretty good, one of just twenty years since 1963 at the level of 65.6% or higher. 66% of the time the homeownership rate has been lower than it was in 2024. 



In 2023 housing affordability in the United States bounced off the 2022 low but is still 9.15 points off the more affordable levels of the 1980s

 The median income in 2022 bought just 17.22% of the median house, the all-time low in the most up-to-date data.

In 2023 that rose to 18.89%.

Peak affordability in the data was in 1984 at 28.04%.

 


 

The decline of worker hours in America

 In 1966 all the hours worked by all the full time and part time workers divided by the civilian employment level peaked at about 35.35 hours per worker per week. That's full time level work. That's prosperity.

The flood of Baby Boomers, especially Baby Boomer women under the influence of feminism and the social revolution of the 1960s, and also foreign born workers after the Immigration Act of 1965, into the labor markets after the mid-1960s reduced hours per week per worker by almost 11%, not forming a new stable bottom until the 1980s at about 31.5 hours per week.

Increased labor supply = fewer hours to go around = less prosperity.

By 1999, when peak Baby Boom had passed 40 years of age, hours per week had risen as high as 32.68 per worker per week. That was the end result of the good times kick-started by Ronald Reagan twenty years prior, which hit in four waves: 1984-85, 1989, 1995, and 1999.

But the whole subsequent period 2003-2019 inclusive fell apart.

Many, many troubles reduced hours worked per worker by almost 7% between 1999 and 2009, not the least of which were admission of China to the World Trade Organization in 2001, and the Great Recession.

Hours per week per worker have risen again as of 2022, but only to the old bottom, at around 31.57 per week.

Median real earnings per week are up just $38 since 1979.

Will that be As Good As It Gets?

 




 

 

Monday, May 26, 2025

Germany lifts weapons restrictions on Ukraine

 


Putin pummels Kyiv for a third consecutive record night, makes a fool of Trump and his naive peace overtures and Friedrich Merz's promise of cruise missiles if elected in Germany

The West is supine before a third world dictator equipped with gas stations and nuclear weapons.
 
 

... The Russian bombardment on Sunday night included 355 drones, Yuriy Ihnat, head of the Ukrainian air force’s communications department, told The Associated Press.

The previous night, Russia fired 298 drones and 69 missiles of various types at Ukraine in what Ukrainians said was the largest combined aerial assault during the conflict. From Friday to Sunday, Russia launched around 900 drones at Ukraine, officials said. ...

Russia has this month broken its record for aerial bombardments of Ukraine three times. ...

 




Sunday, May 25, 2025

House Speaker Mike Johnson's spending bill is in big trouble with the US Senate's Ron Johnson

 



... You have heard people talk about zero-based budgeting. I'm talking about a budget of $5.5 trillion to $6.5 trillion. Those are options from Clinton, Obama, and Trump (first term), where you just take their actual outlays, plus them up by population growth and inflation, leaving Social Security, Medicare, and interest untouched. That would leave you somewhere between $5.5 trillion and $6.5 trillion. So you start there, but you have to do the work, and you need the time to do the work. ... I think we have enough [senators] to stop the process until the president gets serious about spending reduction and reducing the deficit.