Trump's NASA budget cuts threaten Congressionally-mandated identification of city-killing near-earth-objects

 

... Astronomers have found roughly 95 per cent of the near-Earth objects larger than 1km, and none of them poses any threat to Earth. We know much less about the smaller ones. An asteroid as slender as 50m across can wreck a city. Of the nearly quarter of a million that are around that size in Earth’s neighbourhood, 93 per cent remain undiscovered. ...

In July 1994, fragments of a comet called Shoemaker-Levy 9 smashed into Jupiter, and Nasa, for the first time ever, caught the spectacle on video. Later that summer, Congress tasked Nasa with mapping all near-Earth objects larger than 1km, sobered by the sight of the comet’s cataclysmic Earth-sized impacts. The brief was then expanded to include 90 per cent of all objects 140m or larger — a task that is still less than halfway complete. ...

In 2028, Nasa plans to launch an infrared asteroid-detecting telescope called NEO Surveyor. The following year, which the UN has designated “International Year of Asteroid Awareness and Planetary Defence”, an asteroid called Apophis [~375m] will pass within 32,000km of Earth, closer than some satellites. A Nasa spacecraft is on its way to study Apophis in detail. ...

More. 

TACO Trump strikes again

 Trump always chickens out, aka paper tiger, etc.

(June 2) Trump administration pauses Social Security benefit cuts over defaulted student loans

 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):

US extends tariff pause on some Chinese goods through to August 31

 

Whatever else may be said about Rene Girard, he grasped the big problem even if he miscast it as capitalist, namely Chinamerica

 

 “Everyone now knows that the looming conflict between the US and China, for example, has nothing to do with a ‘clash of civilisations’, despite what some might try to tell us. We always try to see differences where in fact there are none. In fact, the dispute is between two forms of capitalism that are becoming more and more similar,” Girard wrote.

Quoted here.

It's not two forms of capitalism. It's two forms of fascism. 

America became its own enemy long before China did.

Girard defaulted to the priority of religion over economics beginning in 1959.

At around noon on 14 April, 2025, America ceased to have a law-abiding government

 On Monday Trump chose to ignore a 9-0 Supreme Court ruling to repatriate an illegally deported man.

More.

I guess we'll just have to have a Fourth Reich, then, armed to the teeth with nukes: Millennials Pete Hegseth and J. D. Vance think the Europeans are freeloaders

 

In the chats, the user identified as Vice President JD Vance expresses concerns about the strikes but ultimately agrees to go along with US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth's plan - before adding 'I just hate bailing Europe out again.'

Hegseth responds: 'I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It's PATHETIC.' 

And of course they want to throw Mike Waltz under the bus:

There are claims that Mr Waltz is facing the sack over the saga - as he's believed to have been the official who 'added the editor-in-chief [of The Atlantic] to the group'.

One source told Politico: 'Everyone in the White House can agree on one thing: Mike Waltz is a f***ing idiot.'

The Financial Times reports that privately some German officials are starting to wonder out loud whether the time has come to acquire their own nuclear arsenal.

Stupid Republicans who work for the IRS in Ogden, Utah voted for their own firings

 Republican politicians face mounting anger over Doge cuts

... In a county Donald Trump won by more than 20 percentage points last November, Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) seemed to be “actively working to destroy our lives and the livelihood of our local economy”, said IRS employee Torrie, whose mother and grandmother also worked at the agency, and who asked for her full name not to be published for fear of reprisals. ...

Republican Senator Mike Crapo is full of Orwellian crap, says extending the Trump tax cuts which increased deficits by $1.7 trillion won't keep increasing deficits

 

 If you're not changing the tax code, you're simply extending current policy—you are not increasing the deficit. The bottom line here is that it's a $4.3 trillion tax increase, not a $4.3 trillion deficit increase. 

-- Mike Crapo 

Most of the tax cuts passed by Republicans during President Donald Trump’s first term, in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA), which raised deficits by $1.7tn, are set to expire at the end of 2025. ... Without new legislation, current law requires tax rates to return to their pre-TCJA levels. Maintaining the current policy would cost nearly $5tn in lost revenue over the next 10 years. 

-- Oren Cass

Passing economic legislation through the US Senate can by-pass the 60-vote rule if the legislation does not increase deficits beyond 10 years. 

The total public debt has ballooned by over $16 trillion under the Trump tax cuts.

Trump's grifting, shape-shifting billionaire crypto czar David Sacks calls Zelenskyy a grifter lol

 

 David Sacks, a Jewish South-African, is another one of Trump's end-run-around-the-rules appointees like Elon Musk.

Like Musk he is one of Trump's "special government employees" who was not confirmed by the US Senate and who has not divested from all of his private business activities while he influences federal government policy. There is no government oversight of David Sacks.

Sacks licks his finger and checks the wind direction like the rest of his parasitical tech bro friends. He has made large political contributions in the past to the campaigns of both Mitt Romney and later to Hillary Clinton, as well as to RFK Jr., among others.

Like J. D. Vance, he believes in nothing very much except what's good for himself and his friends. "They are very rich people who want to buy political power", according to Edward Luce (below).

Sacks spews a litany of falsehoods about Zelenskyy and Russia's invasion of Ukraine here in an interview with the numbskull Jesse Watters. He has stated that Ukraine provoked the Russians to attack in 2022, a belief which Republicans booed last summer because it isn't true, according to Edward Luce of The Financial Times, who was there:

Sacks said on the opening night of the Milwaukee Republican convention, which I am also attending, that the US “provoked” Russia to invade Ukraine. As much as Sacks denies strenuously that he was booed by delegates. I beg to differ. The sceptical reception to Sacks’ Putin-friendly diatribe was the least unreassuring moment of what is the most dystopian political convention I have witnessed.

The Trump administration is no different than the Bush 43 administration: You're either with us or against us

The oh so precious little commie Alex Soros fears the Trump bullies when it's the GOP Senate which Trump still can't completely intimidate.

Alex is worried that Marx was wrong about the tragedy coming first lol. 

Don't worry, Alex. It's only Farce, part deux.

 

Oren Cass: In JD Vance libertarian economics and neoconservative foreign policy are being excised from Republican conservatism

 But there is no Trumpism, only Trump.

Yikes.

Methinks JD Vance will be a very unhappy VP, seeking to rest a spell on his one-legged stool as reality bites.

Oren Cass for the Financial Times, here.

Nigel Farage: the most farcical general election launch in history

 

 Rishi Sunak calls July 4 UK general election

Prime minister gambles by triggering vote when polls suggest heavy defeat

We have the Napoleon wannabe in Paris, Emmanuel Macron, threatening to send in NATO troops, to thank for Putin's explicit threat to use nuclear weapons

 Vladimir Putin warns of wider conflict over Ukraine

 Russian president makes most explicit threat to use nuclear weapons since full-scale invasion:

Referring to French President Emmanuel Macron’s refusal to rule out sending western troops to Ukraine this week, Putin said Russia remembered “the fate of those who once sent their contingents to our country. “Now the consequences for possible interveners will be much more tragic,” he added. “We also have weapons that can strike targets on their territory.”

CNBC similarly here:

The comments appeared to be a direct response to French President Emmanuel Macron’s suggestion earlier this week that European heads of state and Western officials, who had met in Paris on Monday, had talked about the possibility of sending ground troops into Ukraine.

The French leader on Monday said there was no consensus on the idea, but that it had not been “ruled out.”

The comments have since sent NATO countries scrambling to deny they’d send troops into Ukraine, with Russia warning that such a deployment would prompt an “inevitable” Russia-NATO conflict.

 

The Financial Times lol: Liberal democracy good, conservative democracy bad

 Is The Financial Times' coverage worth a pound sterling?

 

Bank of America paper losses on bond portfolio exceed $100 billion at end of 1Q, amounting to 20% of all such unrealized losses for all US banks

 Bank of America Nurses $100B Paper Loss After Big Bet in Bond Market

The English flatter themselves with this delusion

Americans, Long Besotted by Royalty, Mourn Britain's Queen

 

 

And just like that we have a Russian invasion of Ukraine from every direction

 Vladimir Putin obviously cares less about the money he can make off oil exports than he does about reincorporating Ukraine into Russia.

The Financial Times says Trudeau has gone too far invoking the Emergencies Act against the peaceful protest of the Canada Freedom Convoy, calls restrictions on truckers' cross border travel "government over-reach"

 Here:

Canadian leader Justin Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergencies Act this week in response to the occupation was a step too far, however. The measures are designed to respond to insurrection, espionage and genuine threats to the Canadian constitution rather than peaceful protest, no matter how irritating and inconvenient. The right to such protest is fundamental to a free society. Such protests often involve inconveniencing people, whether that means the pickets of striking workers, Britain’s anti-climate change group Extinction Rebellion, or the Freedom Convoy.

 

https://www.ft.com/content/1f83d3dc-a95b-4947-92ba-4f08899228a3?segmentId=b385c2ad-87ed-d8ff-aaec-0f8435cd42d9 

 

 

 

 

 

The editorial oddly refers to the draconian financial repression undertaken by Trudeau under the Act without actually condemning it, saying only in a general way that the government's response has been illiberal and mishandled.

 

Trudeau's henchman, Chrystia Freeland, has had a long association with The Financial Times from the 1990s.

 

LOL, CNBC a week ago said vaccinations in India, home of the Delta variant, helped to bring about the decline in cases

Public health experts told the Financial Times in late May that regional lockdowns, reduced social interaction and an increasing number of antibodies against Covid among the general population were helping to bring down the infection rate in India. Vaccinations too have helped to continue the downward trend in cases.

More.

Cases per million plummeted 91% between May 7 and July 23, at which point just 7% of India's massive population of 1.3 billion had been fully vaccinated.

The vaccines had nothing to do with the crash in cases, but they may have helped cause this debacle in India.

Vaccination temporarily weakens the immune system, making it more vulnerable to infection, which is why it is inadvisable to vaccinate en masse when infections are raging around you. Mind you, in India on February 18th they were not. It would have been as safe a time as any to start vaccinating.

Yet is it mere coincidence that the massive explosion in cases in India after the approximate bottom around February 18th dovetails perfectly with the commencement of mass vaccinations in India around February 13th?

Well?

I think Nottle.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As for the antibody hypothesis, the faith placed in it after all this time is quite simply precious.

Antibody tests can miss previous COVID-19 infection

Antibody tests do not reliably confirm that someone has had COVID-19, which means global estimates of infection rates are likely inaccurate, according to researchers. "We studied the blood of over 120 people with confirmed COVID-19 and measured levels of antibodies ... using 14 different tests" up to three months after diagnosis, said Michael Peluso of the University of California, San Francisco. "All of these people definitely had COVID-19, but not all of them had positive COVID-19 blood tests." The accuracy of the tests at confirming prior COVID-19 varied by how sick the person had been, how much time had passed since the illness and which test had been used. "People who were less sick and in whom more time had passed were less likely to test positive using certain tests," Peluso said. "Since most people have mild (or even asymptomatic) infection with SARS-CoV-2, this study has important implications for our interpretation of several of the large studies that have been done ... to try to estimate the number of people who have had COVID-19." In a report published on Friday in the journal Science Advances, his team advises, "Individual patients or providers using these assays to assess the presence or absence of prior infection and/or immune status should take these considerations into account, given the poor negative predictive value of some tests."

 

 

 

Martin Wolf for The Financial Times likes business historian Adam Tooze's important new book CRASHED: HOW A DECADE OF FINANCIAL CRISES CHANGED THE WORLD

See Martin Wolf, What really went wrong in the 2008 financial crisis?

Tooze has been making the rounds at places like Bloomberg (and especially here) and CNBC promoting the theses of the new book, and was notably interviewed yesterday on Bob Brinker's radio program "Money Talk" (the dismissive summary of the interview provided here is notably blind to Tooze's importance, weakly observing how Tooze maintains that "money has no tangible underpinning", which is about all that grabs the attention of libertarian fundamentalists).

Those more popular presentations give only a tantalizing hint of the narrative power this trained historian brings to the story of the 2008 panic.

To see that in action there is an important lecture available here which Tooze gave at the American Academy in Berlin earlier this year, on March 13th.

"Conservatives" will doubtlessly recoil at Tooze's characterizations of the role played by them during the financial crisis. That those conservatives are really the GOP's libertarians is a distinction the significance of which seems lost on Tooze.

That said, the value of Tooze's perspective goes far beyond the subject of the warring factions of libertarian fundamentalism and neoliberalism, however important those are for understanding our times.

For one thing, Tooze is almost unique in describing in such vivid detail the dominating role now played by the "dollar" in the global economy (American analyst Jeffrey Snider being the notable but obscure exception). It takes an historian. This is, of course, the eurodollar, the proper understanding of which permits Tooze to show how the financial crisis in the United States centered in the mortgage market was globalized via international banking through London and Frankfurt independently of the wishes of the state actors. It also reveals to him that the most important global economic relationship has not been the US with China but the US with London.

Same as it ever was. The king and his colonies still rule the world, with a little help from the Bank of England.

For another, Tooze's work shows the degree to which the global economy has been captured by the bankers in providing these eurodollars, who acted unilaterally behind the scenes, first in the US (Ben Bernanke) and regrettably only later in Europe (Mario "whatever it takes" Draghi), to provide liquidity swaps in the trillions of dollars during the financial crisis while politicians argued about how states should deploy mere billions.

One inescapable conclusion ten years after the financial crisis is that citizens of states are in larger measure no longer masters of their own destinies, and haven't been for a very long time. They are today really ruled by technocrats in charge of central banks who work now more, now less in concert with their host governments to manage economic flows. The danger of this global state capitalism is that it might one day slip back into the outright fascism it so closely resembles.

To the millions of unemployed who were not bailed out in the crisis and who lost their homes and their hope in the United States and in the PIIGS, or to the hundreds of thousands of Muslims now in Chinese reeducation camps, it already has.

The crisis for neoliberalism does not come from capitalist fundamentalism. It comes from its growing list of victims.

How the mighty are fallen: The Financial Times calls National Review "establishment GOP"

Here:

"Publications such as the National Review have long been part of the establishment GOP while drawing on outsider status as the Democrats held control of the White House."

That whir you're hearing is William F. Buckley, Jr., who died in 2008, spinning in his grave.