Thursday, September 18, 2025
Wednesday, September 17, 2025
FOMC lowers the Funds Rate 0.25 to 4.25 on a vote of 11-1
Trump's new cry baby appointee Stephen Miran voted against it because he wanted a cut of 0.5 instead lol.
Only "one official did not want any cuts, including Wednesday’s."
Story here.
Biden gutted the Strategic Petroleum Reserve by 200k barrels over 12 months in 2022, Trump's been in office 8 months and has done BUPKIS to refill it
Spot WTI averaged nearly $95/barrel in 2022.
In 1H2025 it averaged $68.
The price fell again in August to an average just under $65, too.
Trump could be refilling at cheap prices, but he's too busy with nonsense.
The Dominionist wackos in MAGA allied with Peter Thiel continue to spew falsehood
... Trae Stephens, a Thiel ally and self-proclaimed “arms dealer” who co-founded the drone warfare company Anduril (another warped Lord of the Rings reference), frames his work as part of a quest to “carry out God’s command to bring his Kingdom to earth as it is in Heaven.” Stephens’s wife, Michelle, co-founded ACTS 17 Collective (Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society), which evangelizes to tech workers and is hosting Thiel’s Antichrist lectures. ...
More.
There is no such command.
Some Christians still understand that:
[Turning Point USA speaker] Leigh-Allyn Baker rallied her fellow parishioners at Conduit Church in Franklin, Tennessee, 20 miles south of the capital, to not let Charlie Kirk’s death be in vain.
In a video the church played for a service Sept. 14, Baker encouraged the audience to speak more boldly and publicly for their conservative values than ever before. ...
Conduit congregants welcomed Baker’s video with whoops, shouts and tears, signaling a shared grief. Among those congregants, one person wore a hat that read: “Pray hard, lift heavy, stay deadly.”
But Christians who are angry over Kirk’s death cannot be violent or retaliatory, [Conduit pastor Darren] Tyler said in his sermon.
“Some of you are angry. Some of you want revenge,” Tyler said. “The Bible speaks very clearly: ‘Vengeance is mine, says the Lord,’” Tyler said. “If you’re thinking about it, I’m rebuking you right now. We do not make Jesus king by force.” ...
Look who's blaming the victims again!
These guys slapped ginormous tariffs on China and now complain China is straining relations.
They also blamed Ukraine for starting the war with Russia.
The chutzpah.
They're painting the left as terrorists for a reason, but they don't have the courage to name them . . . yet
Designated terror organizations can be legally attacked using the US military. They'll do the designating, and then they'll do the attacking.
That's why they are doing this.
That's why they are fascists.
Stop Left-Wing Terror Networks and Their Funding
Tuesday, September 16, 2025
Trump is not faithfully executing the April 2024 law which required TikTok to be divested from Chicom ByteDance or be shut down in the United States by January 19, 2025
Biden signs Israel, Ukraine, TikTok bill into law
Oracle and Silver Lake part of TikTok investor group as Trump extends deal deadline [for the fourth time]
Impeach the bastard.
So Tyler Robinson admitted to his trans roommate in text messages revealed today that he used his grandfather's rifle, and that he committed the crime because he had had enough of Charlie Kirk's hatred
Can we move on now from all the broad-brush-stroking, conspiracy theories, and hysteria?
... Several of the messages, which were detailed in charging documents shared with CNBC later Tuesday, contained romantic sentiments.
The roommate told police that, on the day of the shooting, Robinson texted, “Drop what you’re doing. Look under my keyboard,” the documents alleged.
The roommate looked and found a note stating, “I had the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk and I’m going to take it.”
After reading the note, the roommate texted Robinson, “What?????????????? You’re joking, right????”
Robinson replied that, “To be honest I had hoped to keep this secret till I died of old age. I am sorry to involve you.”
The roommate asked, “you weren’t the one who did it right????”
Robinson wrote back, “I am, I’m sorry.”
When the roommate asked why Robinson did it, he replied, “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.”
Robinson also texted that he had been planning the shooting for “a bit over a week,” according to the charging documents.
And he discussed dropping a firearm at the university after fleeing, texting the roommate, “If I am able to grab my rifle unseen, I will have left no evidence.”
He added: “I’m wishing I had circled back and grabbed it as soon as I got to my vehicle, I’m worried what my old man would do if I didn’t bring back grandpa’s rifle.” ...
If you paid attention to NeverTrump, you knew Charlie Kirk was a phony ten years ago, which is why he promoted fellow phony J. D. Vance to be VP
Kirk hated Trump but saw an opportunity, claims ex-employee...
Well no shit.
The GOP today is riddled with sycophants who formerly opposed Trump but support him now. Those of us who supported Trump in 2015-2016 took great pleasure in pointing it out as they came crawling back.
Many who changed their minds about supporting Trump defend themselves today by saying they changed their minds because they were persuaded by reflection on the Trumpist agenda, but none of that is becoming the law of the land today through the GOP Congress. It's all by executive order and lawfare. None of this will last, except for the ka-ching ka-ching.
In Charlie Kirk's case, flipping to Trump has been bery bery good for Turning Point USA, which went from a lousy little $2 million operation in 2015 to an $80 million one by 2022.
I mean, how many dollars will it take before we actually get some of that fiscal responsibility, free markets, and limited government which it is supposed to promote, seeing that we're headed for a $2 TRILLION deficit by September 30th?
Considering how awful Trump is now on just about everything compared with his first term, it must be that they all flipflopped only for the money, the power, and the influence.
Democratic Socialists of America conduct first poll, find 74% of likely Democrat voters agree with higher taxes, more regulation, and more public ownership of industry
Socialism going mainstream? New poll suggests might be...
... This survey marks the first formal poll the DSA Fund has released — the latest example of the left seeking to professionalize its operations and create infrastructure to build on its recent electoral victories. The organization said it plans to share its findings with hundreds of socialists elected around the country. ...
In the poll, democratic socialists were defined as believing “that the government should take a more active role to improve Americans’ lives. They generally support higher taxes on corporations and high-income earners, support regulations that protect workers and consumers, and want more public ownership of key industries like housing, health care and utilities.” ...
74 percent of likely Democratic voters said democratic socialism comes closest to their viewpoint, while 16 percent said the same of capitalism. A plurality of independent voters and a majority of Republicans said they preferred capitalism.
The survey of 1,257 likely voters nationwide, conducted from Aug. 22 to 24 using web panel respondents, had a 3-point margin of error.
Do you not see what's happening here? The Trump administration is declaring everything it doesn't like to be terrorism in order to justify autocratic repression of it using the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force
The run of the mill narco smugglers from Venezuela suddenly are terrorists under Trump, so they blow them up.
Suddenly the left wing Charlie Kirk critics are being transformed into terrorists, too, so they say they will also destroy them.
Who's next? Where will it end?
J. D. Vance once wanted to stop this underlying basis for neo-con adventurism. Now the chameleon is part of its expansion to include unconstitutional domestic repression.
These people must be stopped.
Monday, September 15, 2025
It's remarkable how quickly people on the right have 86ed the fact that a right wing nut assassinated the top Democrat in the Minnesota House just a few months ago
And I can't find any record of The Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan wringing her hands in a column over the dire implications of this assassination for the country like she did for Charlie Kirk's. In June and July Peggy was all about thinking, not emoting. In September she's losing her shit.
A nut killing some Democrats is no reason to lose your head, I guess, but killing a Republican, now that's different.
Peggy Pot Noonan warned MAGA Kettle about emotionalism in July lol
... A last note. If I were a fervent Trump supporter, I would worry about that movement’s hyperemotionalism. We have written in this space that with the rise of social media, Americans are becoming a people of feeling and not of thinking, a people in search of sensation and not reflection. It isn’t promising that this is increasingly true in our political sphere. I follow on social media fixtures of the MAGA movement. They say of each other in public what in politics 40 years ago people said in private and when drunk. FRAUD, LIAR, GRIFTER, WHORE. What a hothouse. Do they expect that with a nature like that they can go into the future as a serious force and a movement that coheres? They don’t seem to worry about it. Why not? ...
Here.
And here she was the week before lol:
Isolationism is essentially emotional. You’re angry at the cost in blood and treasure of your country’s international forays and adventures and want to withdraw from the world. Emotionalism can hold sway and dominate politics for a time, even an era, but you can’t build anything on it. It doesn’t last because emotions change because facts change. ...
It's laughable to say that Charlie Kirk was squarely at the median of American politics
It would be an example of extremism if a voter advocated for the death penalty for Joe Biden for his immigration policy crimes, as Charlie Kirk did in July 2023.
What Joe Biden did with immigration policy, which is basically let them all in, which by the way he promised in his campaign for president in 2020 in nationally televised debates, is indeed criminal to many of us on the right. But we know that presidents get away with murder. We ought to change that, too, but presidents are in fact immune.
More autocratic rule by national emergency from Mad King Ludwig
Is that national emergency #53? I'm losing count.
The governor of Utah Spencer Cox promotes hysteria, needs to get a grip
... “If your view of America is not shaken right now, then there’s something wrong with you,” Cox said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“This is a direct assault on America,” he continued. ...
More.
Oh yeah, it's a veritable Blitzkrieg! How will we ever get through it?!
Sunday, September 14, 2025
It's an American tradition: Peggy Noonan loses her head
Charlie Kirk’s Assassination Feels Like a Hinge Point: What a disaster for the young. It will forever shape their understanding of politics in America, Peggy Noonan, WSJ Opinion, September 11, 2025
... We are in big trouble.
We all know this. We don’t even know what to do with what we know. But the assassination of Charlie Kirk feels different as an event, like a hinge point, like something that is going to reverberate in new dark ways. It isn’t just another dreadful thing. It carries the ominous sense that we’re at the beginning of something bad. Michael Smerconish said on CNN Thursday afternoon that normally after such an event the temperature goes down a little, but not in this case, and he’s right. There are the heartbroken and the indifferent and they are irreconcilable. X, formerly Twitter, was from the moment of the shooting overrun with anguish and rage: It’s on now. Bluesky, where supposedly gentler folk fled Elon Musk, was gleefully violent: Too bad, live by the gun, die by the gun.
But what a disaster all this is for the young. ...
No, we are not in big trouble.
We are simply in the same trouble we've always been in, but that doesn't sell newspapers or drive clicks.
But surrendering to hysteria will misguide us, as surely as Tyler Robinson's feelings misguided him when he pulled that trigger, allegedly.
Didn't the country just get over surrendering its mind to its feelings?
Or are we, left, right, and in between, going to do this all over again?
Fear of death made 270 million Americans trust a completely novel vaccine in 2021, only for over 20 million new infections in early 2022 to rip the mask off the whole thing.
We found out that we were not going to die.
We found out that the experts oversold the threat and the vaccine, ka-ching ka-ching, that after taking it "the virus didn't stop with me". We got sick anyway, and we continued to spread it. The adults knew that the virus was mutating to spread at the cost of its deadliness, but the adults were not in charge. We ended up learning the hard way.
The virus of violence is endemic to the world. Woke is a counterfeit. Summer 2020 was not a summer of love. Christianity is Uberwoke and explains that hate lives in us all.
The spectrum of hate's evidence is wide: By intentional homicide rate, Canada ranks 111th in the world in 2023. Mexico ranks 18th, and the United States ranks 66th.
But in 1975 the intentional homicide rate in the United States was 9.6 per 100,000. 9.6 is 43rd in 2023, Iraq-like. In 2023 the United States is 5.8. The rate is down 40%.
We have become far less violent, not more, in the last fifty years, even as religious faith supposedly has declined.
Maybe we should rethink that. Or maybe for starters we should just think.
Brethren, be not children in understanding: howbeit in malice be ye children, but in understanding be men.
-- I Corinthians 14:20
Saturday, September 13, 2025
The solution to the homeless problem to Brian Kilmeade of Fox News is to "just kill them"
And we wonder why there is so much violence in our country.
Listen for yourself.
Generally speaking, as long as such outrageous statements do not target a specific individual they pass the smell test for freedom of speech.
You may not be able to shut them up, but you don't have to pay them, or vote for them.
Friday, September 12, 2025
25th anniversary of the August 2000 S&P 500 high
The 25 years previous to August 2000 were 104.15% better.
The fiscal year is rapidly coming to a close, and Trump has spent us $1.973 trillion deeper into the hole with one month left to go, compared with Biden's last year at $1.897 trillion through August
Meanwhile ...
... [Charlie] Kirk, who had millions of social media followers, co-founded the non-profit Turning Point USA in 2012 as a teenager, which he dubbed a 'national student movement.'
Its mission is to 'identify, educate, train and organize students to promote the principles of fiscal responsibility, free markets, and limited government.' ...
Thursday, September 11, 2025
CNBC has a good table of all the stuff that cost more in August 2025
I had to shell out a grand for new brake lines on one old car last month, and nearly half that on a tune-up for the other.
Beats buying a new car by a long shot, but holy hell, motor vehicle repair up 15% yoy.
Here’s the inflation breakdown for August 2025 — in one chart
There's a lot of BS and fear-mongering being circulated about the preliminary total nonfarm payrolls benchmark revision of -911,000 from two days ago
It all betrays an inability to think.
Bloomberg here said:
... The number of workers on payrolls will likely be revised down by a record 911,000, or 0.6%, according to the government’s preliminary benchmark revision out Tuesday. The final figures are due early next year. ...
No, it's not at all likely.
It's a preliminary number for crying out loud, the size of which reflects more on the increasing difficulty BLS is having gathering the monthly data in more or less real time than it does on the data itself.
Bloomberg then followed that up with a scary chart of previous preliminary benchmark revision estimates, as if those represented reality, too. And then people who should know better repeated the scary chart.
This story went particularly hysterical about it: The BLS Hallucinated a Million Jobs. The Fed Can't Fix This.
But we've known since February what the BLS really thinks the final numbers are, in thousands, and all these irresponsible sources just leave that out, because . . . clicks:
2024: -598, not -818
2023: -187, not -306
2022: +506, not +462
2021: -7, not -166
2020: -121, not -173
2019: -489, not -501
2018: -16, not +43
2017: +135, not +95
2016: -81, not -150
2015: -172, not -208.
But what does it all mean, Bertie?
Over ten years BLS is saying it overestimated in its regular monthly total nonfarm payrolls reports by a net 1.03 million jobs, not by 1.722 million as in the preliminary benchmark revision reports.
The reality's not even 9,000 jobs a month too many, in a payroll universe where nearly 160 million people are working, but I'm supposed to be scared because they thought it might have been more like an overestimate of 14,000 a month?
C'mon, man.
They're doing a damn good job at BLS, and it's time more people said "thank you" for a change.
If you want to politicize the February benchmark data, they show Biden's record over four years had a net 286,000 fewer jobs in reality, but Trump I had 491,000 fewer.
But you won't hear that from this flock of idiots.
Wednesday, September 10, 2025
The suspect previously reported in custody in the Charlie Kirk assassination has been released
What in the hell is going on in Utah?
The shooter is still at large.
Housing affordability is up for a second year in a row in 2024, which is better than a sharp stick in the eye
Housing affordability hit a record low 17.22% in 2022.
That is to say, median household income bought 17.22% of the median sales price of a house sold in the United States in 2022.
The 2024 figure is 19.98%, which is just a little lower than in 2013, when it was 20.12%. Affordability also is about where it was in the middle of the Bush 43 administration, the height of the previous housing bubble.
As you can plainly see, houses were much more affordable in the 1990s, and even more affordable before that. It's a picture of declining affordability overall since then.
Housing did get briefly more affordable in 2009 . . . when 5.5 million people lost their jobs and completed foreclosures were on their way to 6+ million.
Median household income in this data is updated but once a year, and for 2024 that was yesterday.
Core producer prices, not seasonally adjusted, were up 2.827% year over year in today's report for August 2025
The climb-down from last month's report for July 2025 at 3.655% year over year was YUGE.
The numbers have been quite volatile for the last four months.
In today's release, the yoy numbers for Nov 2024 through Mar 2025 remain unchanged from last month's report. The five month average of these for the yoy increase in core wholesale prices has been 3.711%.
Last month the average for April through July came in lower, at 3.144% year over year, but that has now been revised even lower in this month's report, by 2%, to 3.081% yoy.
Combined with the fresh August reading at 2.827% yoy, clearly the trend for the rate increases has been lower overall.
But these levels are far higher than the average 1.629% which prevailed 2012-2020 inclusive. Our new lower August reading is a rate still nearly 74% higher than that.
The wholesale price environment remains highly inflationary compared with the pre-pandemic era.
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