Monday, September 15, 2025

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

... 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 

Friday, September 12, 2025

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

 


 

The FBI in Salt Lake City has just released photos of a person of interest in the Charlie Kirk assassination

 


You're telling me the Fed is going to cut when core cpi inflation at 3.1% year over year in August 2025 is a rate 72% higher than prevailed 2010-2020?

 


Looks like someone's fishing for a rate cut from the Fed with that seasonally-adjusted initial claims for unemployment disparity with not-seasonally adjusted

 


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. 
 
  
 




 

 

Like he contracted a sudden illness or something, or got hit by a car