The Fed Funds Rate will be kept higher for longer.
Friday, January 13, 2023
Year over year in December, broad inflation is down for six consecutive months, core inflation is down three consecutive months
Thursday, January 12, 2023
Classified documents found in Biden's garage on Dec 20
... a small number of additional Obama-Biden Administration records with classified markings were found in the President’s Wilmington residence garage. One document consisting of one page was discovered in an adjacent room.
Story here.
These document eruptions aren't as funny as Bill Clinton's bimbo eruptions.
America in decline.
Wednesday, January 11, 2023
LOL: Not only 10-year old classified documents found in VP Biden's drawers marked "personal", but "three or four boxes containing papers that fall under the Presidential Records Act"
CNN, the first name in news!, here:
Among the items from Joe Biden’s time as vice president discovered in a private office last fall are 10 classified documents including US intelligence memos and briefing materials that covered topics including Ukraine, Iran and the United Kingdom, according to a source familiar with the matter. ...
The classified documents were dated between 2013 and 2016, according to the source familiar. They were found in three or four boxes also containing unclassified papers that fall under the Presidential Records Act. ...
The documents were discovered on November 2, just six days before the midterm elections, but the matter only became public Monday due to news reports. ...
The lawyer saw a manila folder that was labeled “personal,” opened the envelope and noticed there were classified documents inside.
Tuesday, January 10, 2023
US National Archives, a bunch of partisan hacks
It will never not be funny that our US National Archives was all over Trump like white on rice but hadn't the slightest bit of interest in finding classified documents from the Obama administration that went missing for five years because VP Joe Biden had them in his drawers.
Like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, VP Joe Biden discovered to have possessed top secret classified documents FOR YEARS
Way to go, Brandon.
Notice how this was supposedly discovered early last November, but we're only finding out about it now.
Also notice how no one at National Archives is out to investigate Democrats like these for infractions of rules pertaining to classified documents, but if you're President Trump, watch out.
Sweet meteor of death, come to DC.
Sunday, January 8, 2023
Jonathan Mitchell, the man ultimately behind the overthrow of Roe vs. Wade, is a constitutional departmentalist whose real target is judicial supremacy
Early on, Mitchell insisted that, although he personally opposes abortion, “I’m not an anti-abortion activist. I never have been.” His goal is to destroy “judicial supremacy”—the idea that the Supreme Court is the final authority on the meaning of the Constitution—a campaign with bipartisan potential at a moment when liberals and progressives have little to gain from an imposing conservative Court. ...
Mitchell disapproved of the Supreme Court’s use of “language that makes its precedents seem sacrosanct or irreversible,” even going “so far to equate its interpretations of the Constitution with the Constitution itself.” The conventional idea that courts can “strike down,” “invalidate,” or “block” statutes was, he wrote, simply wrong. A court can “opine” that a statute is unconstitutional and tell an official not to enforce it, but the statute nonetheless “remains a law until it is repealed by the legislature that enacted it.” ...
In their dissenting opinions on S.B. 8, both Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Sonia Sotomayor went to first judicial principles by invoking Marbury v. Madison to rebuke Mitchell’s judiciary-evading tactic. In Marbury, in 1803, Chief Justice John Marshall proclaimed, “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.” There, the Supreme Court, for the first time, declared an act of Congress unconstitutional and “entirely void.” Because the Court implied that its own authority to interpret the Constitution is superior to that of the other branches, the case is the fountainhead of judicial supremacy. One could view it as a power grab that we have mostly accepted for more than two hundred years.
Mitchell said he found it telling that Roberts and Sotomayor treated judicial supremacy as “axiomatic” rather than as “a choice that must be defended.” From the beginning of the country, there were prominent anti-federalists who were opposed to judicial supremacy. Thomas Jefferson—who was President when Marbury was decided—believed that “each department is truly independent of the others, and has an equal right to decide for itself what is the meaning of the constitution.” Jefferson’s view, which scholars have called departmentalism, countered judicial supremacy with the claim that the power to determine whether acts violate the Constitution is enjoyed by each branch in its own sphere of action.
Several Presidents since have embraced departmentalism to varying degrees. Andrew Jackson explained his veto of Congress’s bill to recharter the Second Bank of the United States as being based on its unconstitutionality, even though the Supreme Court had approved Congress’s authority to so act years earlier. He said, “The opinion of the judges has no more authority over Congress than the opinion of Congress has over the judges, and on that point the President is independent of both.” The same year, Chief Justice Marshall held that Georgia’s regulations on Cherokee lands violated federal treaties. An enraged Jackson didn’t enforce the ruling, which enabled Georgia to disobey it.
Abraham Lincoln resisted judicial supremacy in his scathing reaction to Dred Scott v. Sandford, in which the Court declared that Congress’s prohibition of slavery in the territories was unconstitutional. Lincoln, who was not yet President, acknowledged that the Court resolved the parties’ dispute, but he rejected the idea that the ruling authoritatively answered the constitutional question of slavery. In his first Inaugural Address, Lincoln further worried that, if policy on “vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court,” then “the people will have ceased to be their own rulers.” ...
Like other critics of judicial supremacy, Mitchell believes that Congress, rather than the Court, should have final say on constitutional meaning, even if it means rights might shift along with electoral outcomes—and the Court, where possible, should decide matters based on congressional statutes rather than judicial doctrines on constitutional rights.
That approach has recently put Mitchell at odds with other conservative lawyers.
More.
The Eugenics movement, victorious with abortion, aims now for widespread euthanasia to cull the herd of the poor, homeless, and mentally ill
In 2021, only 486 people died using California's assisted suicide program, but that same year in Canada, 10,064 died used MAID to die that year. MAID has now grown so popular that Canada has both anti-suicide hotlines to try and stop people killing themselves, as well as pro-suicide hotlines for people wanting to end their lives. ... MAID has fallen into further scrutiny over claims that people are now seeking assisted suicide due to poverty and homelessness or mental anguish, as opposed to the traditional method of the terminally-ill seeking a painless death.
The January 6th protesters were treated as enemies of the state by the so-called Department of Justice, the Kavanaugh protesters not so much
In it Medvin lays out in detail what she illustrates as the hypocrisy of the government’s approach to punishing (or not punishing) protesters opposing the nomination of Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018. Protesters entering the Capitol were charged under local D.C. statutes as opposed to federal ones.
Medvin cites a tweet from the Women’s March Twitter account during that protest. “Hundreds of people are being trained for today’s #CancelKavanaugh action every 30 minutes this morning. We’re going to flood the Capitol.” Crisis Magazine tweeted later that day: “@womensmarch just took the Capitol. Women, survivors, and allies walked straight past the police, climbed over barricades, and sat down on the Capitol steps.” Others did make it inside the building, into the gallery, disrupting Senate proceedings. They were charged with “Crowding, Obstructing, or Incommoding,” under the local D.C. code.
Medvin points out that only one of the Kavanaugh protesters was charged under federal statutes and that person was ultimately not prosecuted. But even more importantly, in court papers from that case, it states, “Notably, no other person charged with protest and/or disruptive-type behavior at the U.S. Capitol Grounds has been previously charged in federal court for the District of Columbia.”
More.
Saturday, January 7, 2023
Rasmussen Reports wrecks its credibility with this COVID-19 vaccine deaths tweet from Jan 2, both for the scale and the math
73 million don't die in the world every year, let alone in the United States.
At best the math means 73 million KNOW of a vaccine related death. This is why converting math problems into word problems used to be drilled into children's heads. Now they just drill racism into their heads.
Friday, January 6, 2023
Full time employment finished 2022 pretty strong, given the circumstances
Full time in December 2022 was 49.76% of civilian population.
The full year 2022 average was 50.09%.
This still falls short of 2019, and is woefully underperforming even at that level, but considering the economic problems of 2022 the end result is pretty good.
Thursday, January 5, 2023
NFL Draft goes to only seven rounds
GOP leader McCarthy loses 10th House speaker vote as far right Republicans dig in -- CNBC
Tuesday, January 3, 2023
I watched Die Hard on Christmas Eve
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.
Total bond market index for long term investors vs. S&P 500
Return for VBMFX, Vanguard's Total Bond Market Index Fund, investor shares, closed to new investors, inception December 1986-December 2022 per annum:
5.08%.
Return for S&P 500, average nominal, dividends fully reinvested, December 1986-December 2022 per annum:
10.28%.
Long-term investment grade bonds for long term investors vs. the S&P 500
Return for VWESX, Vanguard's Long-Term Investment Grade Bond Fund, inception July 1973-December 2022:
7.48%.
Return for S&P 500, average nominal, dividends fully reinvested, July 1973-December 2022:
10.61%.
Sunday, January 1, 2023
Germany boosts electricity from coal to 10 gigawatts, a drop in the bucket
Bloomberg, here:
Germany now generates more than a third of its electricity from coal-fired power plants, according to Destatis, the federal statistical office. In the third quarter, its electricity from the fuel was 13.3% higher than the same period a year earlier, the agency said.
Germany as recently as 2019 still had 40 gigawatts of electricity capacity from coal, and planned to reduce that to 27 by 2022, so obviously Germany has much more capacity available than 10 gigawatts during its present natural gas supply crisis caused by the Ukraine war.
But Germany's more serious mistake than reducing its coal capacity was its voluntary and hysterical reduction of nuclear generation capacity by 40% in the wake of the Fukushima disaster in 2011. Now it's got just 3 reactors left out of the 17 it had back in the day.
Meanwhile US electric capacity from coal in 2021 dwarfed the German, at about 210 gigawatts, but that is way down from almost 318 in 2011, a similarly ideologically driven, self-imposed, and illogical reduction of 108 gigawatts, or 33% in ten years.
The foolish growing reliance on unreliable "green energy" in the US and the turn away from coal which began in earnest under Obama has meant increasing unreliability of electric resources during extreme events, and a huge increase in the duration of power outages experienced by customers.
The average customer outage was just north of 8 hours in 2020 vs. about 3.5 hours in 2013, an increase of over 130%.
This will only get worse if America tries to rely on wind and solar at the expense of fossil fuels and nuclear.
Climate Update for KGRR 2022
Mean average temperature in Grand Rapids, Michigan since 1892: 48.2 degrees F.
Mean average temperature in 2022: 48.7.
That is all.
Friday, December 30, 2022
US COVID-19 vaccination fell off a cliff in 2022, down 90% from 2021, while confirmed deaths fell by 44% overall
Just 24.3 million received at least one dose in 2022 through Dec 27.
244.06 million had received at least one dose through 12/31/21.
Per Our World In Data, here.
About 19 million in 2022 received what amounts to the two-dose protocol.
Confirmed deaths in 2022 fell to about 264k from 475k in 2021 at the same time that vaccination fell off the cliff (724 deaths per day vs. 1301 deaths per day).
And in the second half of 2022 about only 70k have died (roughly 385 per day vs. 1066 per day in the first half of 2022). That's still 3.85 times worse than for an average influenza year, but that's a win in my book at this stage of the game.
Thursday, December 29, 2022
There was nothing wrong with the coal or natural gas plants of the Tennessee Valley Authority: It was one-off wind damage and too many far-flung customers dependent on its electricity for heat
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."
Tuesday, December 27, 2022
Cumulative season to date 100 inches of snow in Buffalo, NY is record-setting, ahead of Nov-Dec 2000 at 95.9 inches
36.9 total inches in November 2022 (3.1 feet). November record is 45.6 inches (3.8 feet).
63.1 inches in December 2022 through the 26th (5.25 feet). December record is 82.7 inches (6.9 feet).
January record is 68.3 inches.
February record is 54.2 inches.
March record is 38.5 inches.
April record is 15 inches.
May record is 7.9 inches.
The mean average season is 85.4 inches, 55 of which come after Dec. 31st.
Sunday, December 25, 2022
Tennessee has had plenty of much colder temperatures than this Christmas and never had to turn off the power before, but that was before they went insane
What we know: TVA ordered rolling blackouts for the first time in 90 years amid freezing temps
Tennessee Valley Authority retired 3,370 MW of coal electric power capacity in 2012, 2017, and 2018.
The reason for that isn't because the plants were old, built in the 1950s. TVA still operates a bunch of much older hydroelectric plants dating back as far as 1911.
It's pure anti-fossil fuel ideology driving that, and foolishly allocating new capacity to solar and wind, which can't cut it.
And that's why they had to shut off the power in Tennessee for the first time.
The damn fools got 0.7 inches of snow and said it was one inch deep, too.
Saturday, December 24, 2022
CNN thinks November core inflation at 4.7% yoy is good news
There's never any discussion about how core inflation vaulted to the current levels well before the war in Ukraine even began.
The reason for the inflation surge is Biden's war for green energy, the one input which makes everything cost more because green energy costs much more than conventional energy from coal, oil, and natural gas.
Add trillion$ in COVID stimulus chasing too few goods and it's a recipe for the disaster which is ongoing, not moderating.
Some people get it. Most don't.
Friday, December 23, 2022
Joe Biden's America two days before Christmas is a third world patchwork of power outages all over the place
About 1.04 million without power this morning.
It's going to be a rough Christmas Eve without power with forecast real lows in the single digits.
Wednesday, December 21, 2022
The good news is COVID-19 deaths per million were 4-5x worse a year ago than they are now in the US
Deaths per million stabilized 8 months ago at the current level and haven't really budged since then.
Those who predicted an endemic situation developing appear to have been right.
1.2 deaths per million presently represents about 398 deaths per day at current population, or about 11.9k dying per month since mid-April.
Actual cumulative deaths over the period have averaged about 12.25k per month, or 98k.
If that rate persists like this for a full year we'll get something like 147k deaths, which would then still be 4x worse than the average influenza deaths year.
92% of COVID-19 deaths in California continue to be among those 50 and older, and 72% are among those 65 and older.
That's the bad news.
Seems like an unacceptable new normal to me.
Concentrating efforts on vaccinating people younger than 50 seems pointless and highly inappropriate for the situation.
Half of the top 10 snowiest Decembers in Grand Rapids have occurred since 2007
The result, no doubt, of the generally wetter conditions in the Great Lakes over the long haul as predicted by slightly cooler Pacific Ocean waters indicated by the Oceanic Nino Index.
We've had 14+ inches so far in Dec 2022 with 2 feet expected in the latest storm, so this December might break into the top 5.
Winter. It's what's for Christmas.
Tuesday, December 20, 2022
Saturday, December 17, 2022
Friday, December 16, 2022
Foreign ownership level of US Treasury securities fell 6.2% year over year in October
The level contracted to a point approximately last seen in May 2021.
As reported levels in the table are subject to revision in future monthly tables. My graph shows as reported levels in May each year.
The drop probably does not reflect actual selling, but falling market value of UST because of the bond rout.
Wednesday, December 14, 2022
Surprise, surprise, right on schedule progressive Robert Kuttner attacks the 2 percent inflation target in favor of 4 percent
It all sounds very persuasive, as long as you forget how inflation impoverishes the lower classes and keeps them down so that the elites can continue to milk them like slaves year after year. 4% just does it twice as fast as 2%.
The little people are an afterthought to the left.
This is the "inflation is actually good" talk you hear from lefties from time to time.
Story here.
Tuesday, December 13, 2022
Another inflation report is out, the data are bad, but they're trying to spin it that inflation is moderating
The government's chief inflation measure, so-called core inflation which excludes food and energy (third graph), ticked down to 6% in November. Big whoop. Core inflation has now averaged 6.3% throughout 2022, and was actually slightly lower year over year for two months in the summer than it was in November.
The Fed is failing in its effort to bring inflation down, plain and simple.
Higher prices are the new normal.
Meanwhile food inflation is up 12% year over year after peaking above 13% in the summer. Under Trump food inflation was practically non-existent, but Americans have been forced to cope with it month after month for over a year now, with no end in sight.
And energy inflation year over year has been north of 13% for 21 consecutive months. Go ahead. Count 'em. Under Trump we actually had energy disinflation because his administration, unlike Biden's, enthusiastically supported fracking.
Rising food and energy costs are absolutely core, especially when they deliver a one-two punch to the gut like this.
The people hardest hit don't have a voice, however. They never do. The chattering classes are doing just fine, and all they want to talk about is nonsense. Their lot is with the profiteers from inflation, not with the bottom half of the country.
The poor get poorer.
Same as it ever was.
Monday, December 12, 2022
Saturday, December 10, 2022
The thing on the right is now facing two charges for luggage theft
That's some weird fetish :
Sam Brinton [is] the deputy assistant secretary for spent fuel and waste disposition at the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy.
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