Saturday, June 7, 2025
Friday, June 6, 2025
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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. ...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)