... Spot gold was down 0.4% at $4,468.96 per ounce, after marking a record high of $4,525.18 earlier in the session. ...
Silver prices have surged 147% year-to-date on strong fundamentals, outpacing bullion’s gain of over 70% during the same period. ...
Silver hit an all-time high of $72.70 but was last down 0.8% at $70.86 an ounce. ...
More.
Reported here:
... The effort to keep up with higher prices feels relentless to Teri Kopp, who lives in Southbury, Conn., and works as an administrator at a synagogue. “I’m tired,” she said.
Kopp and her husband Bill, an HVAC technician, earn a combined $115,000 a year. They often sit in the dark with only strings of LED lights on to save on electric costs. She is considering painting rocks to send to friends as Christmas gifts. Their biggest vacation this year, a road trip to Maine, was mostly covered by cash back from a shopping-rewards program.
Kopp, 59 years old, doesn’t see any way to quickly pay off the $15,000 in credit-card debt the family took on largely to cover medical bills for knee surgeries. She also has $30,000 in debt from her daughter’s undergraduate degree in biology, which has yet to yield any job offers in a tough labor market for new graduates.
Kopp voted for Trump last November in part because she wasn’t happy with how Biden handled the economy. She approves of the job Trump is doing but is skeptical that it will lead to any relief on costs soon. “I think Trump has a hard nut to crack to bring all this stuff down,” she said. ...
Do the two Rachels at the Wall Street Journal who write this sob story about the middle class "buckling" realize that about half the country makes $45k or less? What about those people? Well, they don't read the Journal anyway, right?
You have to be in the 64th percentile to be like Teri and Bill, the high end of the middle 33-66%.
This is a fabulous tribute to the man who kept his head while all others were losing theirs.
... One of NASA’s most traveled astronauts in the agency’s first decade, Lovell flew four times — Gemini 7, Gemini 12, Apollo 8 and Apollo 13 — with the two Apollo flights riveting the folks back on Earth.
In 1968, the Apollo 8 crew of Lovell, Frank Borman and William Anders was the first to leave Earth’s orbit and the first to fly to and circle the moon. They could not land, but they put the U.S. ahead of the Soviets in the space race. Letter writers told the crew that their stunning pale blue dot photo of Earth from the moon, a world first, and the crew’s Christmas Eve reading from Genesis saved America from a tumultuous 1968.
But the big rescue mission was still to come. That was during the harrowing Apollo 13 flight in April 1970. Lovell was supposed to be the fifth man to walk on the moon. But Apollo 13′s service module, carrying Lovell and two others, experienced a sudden oxygen tank explosion on its way to the moon. The astronauts barely survived, spending four cold and clammy days in the cramped lunar module as a lifeboat. ...
“I think in the history of space flight, I would say that Jim was one of the pillars of the early space flight program,” Gene Kranz, NASA’s legendary flight director, once said. ...
The Apollo 13 crew of Lovell, Haise and Swigert was on the way to the moon in April 1970, when an oxygen tank from the spaceship exploded 200,000 miles from Earth.
That, Lovell recalled, was “the most frightening moment in this whole thing.” Then oxygen began escaping and “we didn’t have solutions to get home.”
“We knew we were in deep, deep trouble,” he told NASA’s historian.
Four-fifths of the way to the moon, NASA scrapped the mission. Suddenly, their only goal was to survive. ...
This was taken down pretty early this morning by the suck-ups at Real Clear Politics. I guess the bosses come in a little later than the help.
This is arguably one of the best discussions of what is really going on that you will find.
In most cases, the parliamentarian looks at whether provisions have a purely budgetary purpose, rather than policy dressed up as a budget item. (This is known as the Byrd Rule, after the longtime Democratic senator from West Virginia, Robert Byrd; the process by which the parties debate the provisions and by which a ruling is made is known as the “Byrd bath.”) ...
For context, the House version costs $3.3 trillion over a decade, according to the latest estimates. We’re verging on $4 trillion for the Senate bill—unless the Republicans’ wish to have the $3.7 trillion in tax cuts entered as zero passes muster with the parliamentarian. ...
Update Wed Jun 25:
Real Clear Politics put this back up in the rotation this morning, lol.
... the White House deputy chief of staff — and chief architect of Trump’s immigration agenda — is taking a sledgehammer to what remains of the libertarian-conservative fusionism that was prominent in the party pre-Trump.
“The libertarians in the House and Senate trying to take down this bill — they’re not stupid. They just don’t care,” Miller said in an interview with conservative activist and commentator Charlie Kirk last week.
“Immigration has never mattered to them; it will never matter to them. Deportations have never mattered to them; it will never matter to them. You will never live a day in your life where a libertarian cares as much about immigration and sovereignty as they do about the Congressional Budget Office.” ...
Miller’s aversion to libertarians, though, seems to go deeper than opportunistic messaging for the bill. He posted in 2022 that the uprising of the ideology in the House GOP is “how we ended up with open borders globalist [Paul] Ryan.” He blamed libertarian candidates for siphoning votes away from failed Trump-endorsed candidates in 2022 — Herschel Walker in Georgia, Blake Masters in Arizona, and Don Bolduc in New Hampshire.
“Another example of how libertarians ruin everything,” Miller said in one post responding to a 2022 Georgia Senate poll. ...
More.
The CBS Poll referenced in the story indicates 55% like Trump's deportation goals but 56% dislike his approach.
Polling on the reconciliation bill indicates most think it will help the wealthy and hurt poor and middle class people, with a third admitting they have no idea what's in the bill. Well, neither did many in the US House who voted for the damn thing.
This points up the political danger of these Christmas Tree bills adorned with something for everyone. They're too complicated to understand and therefore capture little enthusiasm. But Stephen Miller fancifully thinks otherwise:
“By including the immigration language with the tax cuts with the welfare reform, it creates a coalition. Politics is all about coalitions,” Miller said in the interview with Kirk — also praising Trump in the interview as “able to create a winning formula for populist, nationalist, conservative government.”
But not libertarian government.
I get the drinking too much until you barf. I mean, that's pretty much been Freshman Life 101 forever and a day. Pete was a freshman in college in 1999-2000.
But it takes a special kind of excess to drink until you pass out.
Is it true?
Who knows.
One incident was allegedly in 2013, when he was about 32, at which time he had earned an MA from Harvard. Another was when he was about 28, in 2009, when his first marriage ended. That's a long time after graduating from Princeton University in 2003.
The precise timeline is uncertain because his birth year isn't precisely known, and the new revelations come from a former sister in law, married to Pete's brother from 2011-2019, who can't remember the dates exactly.
Anyway, I don't get why the new SECDEF absolutely, positively must be this guy, with all this sooty baggage. No one is that indispensable.
From The Wall Street Journal here:
Pete Hegseth, President Trump’s pick to run the Pentagon, regularly abused alcohol to the point that he passed out at family gatherings, and once needed to be dragged out of a strip club while in uniform, according to an ex-relative’s account of his behavior that was given to U.S. lawmakers and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
The sworn statement, submitted in response to a request from Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, was signed by Hegseth’s former sister-in-law, Danielle Hegseth. It states that she was with Hegseth when he passed out from drunkenness in the bathroom of a bar in Minneapolis in about 2013. It also describes another night, when she said Hegseth drank so much at a restaurant in Minneapolis that the Uber driver had to pull over on Interstate 94 so he could throw up.
Utilities are shutting down "dirty" capacity without adequately replacing it. The law of supply and demand means only one thing: higher prices. OK, two: blackouts.
Meanwhile, tax credits under Biden's phony Inflation Reduction Act are masking the true costs of renewables.
From a Wall Street Journal op-ed "The Coming Electricity Crisis: Artificial-intelligence data centers and climate rules are pushing the power grid to what could become a breaking point" here :
Obama Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz last week predicted that utilities will ultimately have to rely more on gas, coal and nuclear plants to support surging demand. “We’re not going to build 100 gigawatts of new renewables in a few years,” he said. No kidding.
The problem is that utilities are rapidly retiring fossil-fuel and nuclear plants. “We are subtracting dispatchable [fossil fuel] resources at a pace that’s not sustainable, and we can’t build dispatchable resources to replace the dispatchable resources we’re shutting down,” Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioner Mark Christie warned this month.
About 20 gigawatts of fossil-fuel power are scheduled to retire over the next two years—enough to power 15 million homes—including a large natural-gas plant in Massachusetts that serves as a crucial source of electricity in cold snaps. PJM’s external market monitor last week warned that up to 30% of the region’s installed capacity is at risk of retiring by 2030.
Some plants are nearing the end of their useful life-spans, but an onslaught of costly regulation is the bigger cause. A soon-to-be-finalized Environmental Protection Agency rule would require natural-gas plants to install expensive and unproven carbon capture technology.
The PJM report cites “the role of states and the federal government in subsidizing resources and in environmental regulation.” It added: “The simple fact is that the sources of new capacity that could fully replace the retiring capacity have not been clearly identified.”
Meantime, the Inflation Reduction Act’s huge renewable subsidies make it harder for fossil-fuel and nuclear plants to compete in wholesale power markets. The cost of producing power from solar and wind is roughly the same as from natural gas. But IRA tax credits can offset up to 50% of the cost of renewable operators.
Baseload plants can’t turn a profit operating only when needed to back up renewables, so they are closing. This was the main culprit for Texas’s week-long power outage in February 2021 and the eastern U.S.’s rolling blackouts during Christmas 2022.
Walter Russell Mead, here:
Jesus is unique, and women are free and equal in God’s sight. That is what we should take away from this [virgin birth] story.
Christianity, like many world religions, has often been less than fair in its treatment of women. But at the heart of historical Christianity, there has always been the idea that Christmas is a feminist holiday, a feast that celebrates the choice of an autonomous woman. As Christianity has risen to become the largest and most widespread religion in the world, women are coming into their own. It cannot be otherwise.
God didn’t send Jesus into the world because He was satisfied with the status quo. God sent Him here because things needed to change—and right at the top of the list of the things God wanted to change was the position of women. The change didn’t happen overnight, and even today we haven’t seen the full consequences of giving half the world its rightful due; but from the day that Mary answered Gabriel, a new force has been at work in the world. The rise of women to new freedom and new dignity, which is one of the primary developments of our time, is the blossoming of a tree that was planted a very long time ago.
His truth is marching on.
The term Blue Monday was coined by psychologist Dr Cliff Arnall, who worked out a formula to show how the third Monday in January is especially bad.
It takes into account factors including the average time for New Year's resolutions to fail, the bad weather, debt, the time since Christmas and motivational levels. ...
The main theory suggests that a lack of sunlight may stop a part of the brain called the hypothalamus from working properly.
More.
It was much dumber than I remember, but then so was I back in the day.
It turns out that Roger Ebert's review here captured what's wrong with the film.
The review in THE GRAUNIAD here is just laughable.
Yippee-ki-yay.
Cold weather pushed up electricity use in TVA's seven-state region where more than 60% of homes are heated by electricity. ...
TVA Chief Operating Officer Don Moul is heading an investigation of the problems that led to the power outages last week. Moul said in a telephone interview that high winds damaged several of TVA's protective structures at the Cumberland plant and several gas-fired combustion turbines used for such peak power periods. TVA's directive to local power companies to cut some of their energy use was the most efficient means to respond to the inadequate energy supply, Moul said.
More.
The left, of course, is blaming the fossil fuels themselves instead of wind damage to existing energy infrastructure, whose maintenance has been neglected in the rage for so-called green energy and against coal:
"[T]he mandatory blackouts were due to coal and gas failures," [Amy] Kelly [the Tennessee representative for the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal Campaign] said.
The hysteria of this prejudiced response is matched, however, by the feckless customers of the federally-run utility, whose only care is that their power was cut when it was 5 degrees F outside, and on Christmas Eve:
"Why would anyone in their right mind decide it is a GOOD idea to have rolling blackouts today? First of all, it is a whopping 5 degrees outside and second, it is Christmas Eve ... This is ridiculous."
What we know: TVA ordered rolling blackouts for the first time in 90 years amid freezing temps
