Trump says Karoline Leavitt resigning as White House press secretary
Wednesday, August 12, 2026
Saudis ramp up oil exports using Sumed pipeline to the Mediterranean, Sidi Kerir Egypt now exporting 2.3 mbpd in August, more than double the July level
Most of this oil is now going to Europe and the U.S. instead of Asia because of the extra time and shipping cost for going around Africa.
The UAE is now in the catbird seat for shipping oil to Asia, at least until Iran decides to attack Fujairah.
Saudi Arabia ramps up oil exports through Mediterranean pipeline to avoid attacks in Red Sea
... Oil exports from Egypt’s Mediterranean port of Sidi Kerir have more than doubled to about 2.3 million barrels per day in August compared to around 1 million bpd last month, according to data provided by the trade intelligence firm Kpler. The majority of those exports are Saudi crude, said Matt Smith, director of commodity research at Kpler. ...
Saudi exports from Yanbu through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait were down nearly 90% to 1.3 million barrels during the week of Aug. 3, compared with 11 million barrels for the week of July 20 when the Houthis declared the embargo, according to Kpler data. ...
Well, she did a great job flipping the one in the White House in November 2024
Can't take that away from her!
Party of Violence: Democrats have nominated a Jihadi for U.S. Senate from Michigan and an Ojibwe warrior for U.S. Senate from Minnesota
Real Clear Polling reported out Craig by +5 on June 17, Craig Tied with Flanagan on July 22, Craig by +2 on August 7, but Flanagan won by almost +20.
America is based on guns because it's also based on robbery
I mean, we stole the colonies from the king . . . in the second place amirite?
Before that we were stealing his masts.
With no king to rob anymore, we instead rob ourselves.
To be a 1913 millionaire in July 2026, you'll need 33.73 of them, and a high capacity magazine.
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| July 2026 cpi inflation 3.4% |
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| July 2026 core cpi inflation 2.5% |
Some people look at industrial production and see only stagnation since the Great Recession, I see something else
Industrial production last grew above 10% in the first half of 1984, and it's been all downhill since then.
A positive trend struggled to assert itself in the immediate post-war, but eventually succumbed to the siren song, for you Odyssey fans, of foreigners singing the song of lower labor costs.
Our country decided after the struggle of the Great Depression and the victory in the Second World War to sit back and enjoy itself rather than to work as hard as it needed to work and to let others carry the load.
And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry.
-- Luke 12:19
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| 1946-1984 |
Gen Z hypocrites who ridiculed suburban inauthenticity now sad they'll never be able to have it
What Do Young People Really Want? The Suburbs.
A steady job, a simple house, and a quiet life used to sound like hell to many young people. Now the old American dream is back.
Politicians these days cannot stop talking about “affordability,” especially for housing. And Americans’ cries for relief have grown loud enough to push lawmakers from babbling into action. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act became law last month with overwhelming bipartisan support within Congress. It’s encouraging to see members of both parties coming together around something other than just spending more money—and doing so in a way that helps the young more than the old.
In fact, young people are supplying most of the pressure behind this political movement. A Pew Research poll last month found that 89 percent believe buying a home will be harder for them than it was for their parents’ generation.
And it isn’t just the homes themselves. Americans still believe the American dream is worth striving for, yet less than half believe that every American has the opportunity to achieve it. Many young people are trying to find their way toward a lifestyle their parents had that they took for granted and now feel they cannot reach as adults. That includes owning a home, having a good-paying job with benefits, and being able to afford some added comforts in addition to the necessities. In a word, suburbia.
It’s an extraordinary and ironic turn that bourgeois suburban life would become the deepest desire of many young Americans. I grew up in the suburbs in a time when you had to hate the suburbs. ...
If you want to get a feel for the zeitgeist back then, check out Green Day’s 2004 American Idiot album, especially the 9-minute-long epic “Jesus of Suburbia.” Everyone’s so full of shit / Born and raised by hypocrites. It’s a spirited rejection of George W. Bush, the Iraq War, hypocritical parents, and apparently, the suburbs. ...
Tuesday, August 11, 2026
Wayne Allyn Root would like Trump to declare another national emergency, for the election
The emergency will be after the election lol.
Shoulda saved your pennies instead of buying a house
25 years ago copper was 65-cents a pound, today it's $6.65.
Adjusted for inflation it should be more like $1.22. Copper is up 923%.
By contrast the median sales price of houses sold in the United States is up only 140%.
University of Michigan snowflakes in the news
University of Michigan Drops First-Semester Grades to ‘Curb Mental Health Crisis’
A pilot program aims to ease pressure on freshmen and help them adjust to demands of college
The University of Michigan will drop grades for first-semester freshmen next year in an effort to “curb the mental health crisis unfolding among college-aged individuals,” according to the school. ...
Monday, August 10, 2026
Joe Biden's national policy director for his 2020 campaign is pissed off a health care CEO gets $20 million a year while the nation's employees aren't taxed on their health insurance compensation, depriving the federal government of $500 billion a year
That's the single largest tax loss expenditure on the list of tax loss expenditures.
Adding health insurance benefits for employees was a WWII era work-around to FDR's anti-capitalist wage controls, instituted to curb inflation.
When too many were unavailable to do the work because they were off fighting the war, the price of work sky-rocketed. Adding untaxed health insurance benefits helped employers attract and keep workers during wartime.
The untaxed health insurance benefit was & remains tax-free compensation, estimated as today's single largest tax loss expenditure at $500 billion/year.
But Biden's national policy director for his 2020 campaign goes off on a $20m CEO because high compensation earners are the easy target she only pretends are the problem instead of the one you see in the mirror every morning not paying taxes on everything you make.
She needs your votes for the public option, and isn't going to get them by telling you the truth.
The public option, to be sure, would have been superior to the Obamacare Rube Goldberg machine, and is clearly preferable to Medicare For All because the latter would end employer-provided health insurance.
But as with FDR it's still not capitalism, and if you push here something is going to pop out over there and become a problem. The iron laws of supply and demand will always assert themselves, but with capitalism the consequences are immediate, severe, and self-correcting by the market.
If you tax health insurance benefits, you will simply get less health insurance of the kind we have, accompanied by more cries for options from the marketplace for the health insurance we don't have, which if free to provide them . . . will.
Meanwhile a comprehensive federal income tax reform taxing all income at high rates above $102,230 for a single filer and $136,306 for married filing jointly as of June 2026, and at 0% below, is the place to start to reimagine fairness in the United States.
84% of individual earners made less than $100,000 in 2023. The vast majority of them would not notice that an average of $9,500 of employer provided health insurance was being counted as income under the new threshold of $102,230 because they would owe zero taxes anyway.
We need more reality in economics and less fiddling with it, and certainly none of what Abdul is selling, which will require taxing everybody, not just the rich, much more. He is selling "free at the point of care", but nothing is free. Nothing.
Sunday, August 9, 2026
Yes, but it's been all downhill for six years already
... There are already a record 11.6 million Americans aged 65 and older still punching the clock. ... today’s elderly may actually be the last generation capable of working until they die on this scale. ...
More.
The percentage of older Americans working peaked in 2019-2020, as Peak Baby Boom 1957 turned 62. It's been all downhill from there.
The phenomenon has been a function of the size of the cohort relative to the overall population. The Baby Boom is like a dead bunny passing through the body of the snake.
Meanwhile the author fears the jobs these older people do are vulnerable to replacement by AI because they are supposedly overwhelmingly cognitive, so that younger workers will never be able to work until age 67 like many older Americans currently do.
But older workers are a diverse lot, performing a variety of work that can't be dismissed as simply cognitive.
Currently, the top 20 jobs by headcount of workers 55 and over according to the BLS are quite diverse, and categories where growth is expected to one degree or another in green outnumber those where stagnation and decline are expected in red by 3.5:1:
Truck, delivery, tractor trailer drivers 1.3m
Secretaries/admins 1.05m
Registered nurses 1m
Dirty rotten CEOs/senior management 0.95m
Retail supervisors 0.85m
Janitors/cleaners 0.8m
Teachers through grade eight 0.75m
Bean counters/financial managers 0.7m
Retail clerks 0.65m
Personal care aides 0.6m
Farmers/ranchers 0.55m (more than 54% of the industry)
Post-secondary educators 0.5m
Real estate agents 0.45m
Lawyers 0.4m
Property managers 0.35m
Home health aides 0.35m
Bus drivers 0.32m
Maids/housekeepers 0.3m
Billing/posting clerks 0.25m
Religious workers 0.22m.
Saturday, August 8, 2026
The Trump administration is going to become irrelevant in 2 years, if it hasn't already
Fixed it for ya.
20% of the world's oil production will never not be relevant.
Peak Baby Boom 1957 reaching full retirement age in 2023 is driving a new exodus from the labor force making 2023 the biggest single year rate spike in new Social Security enrollments since 2009
New Social Security retirement enrollments experienced a significant +5.01% spike in 2023, marking the largest single-year growth rate since the conclusion of the recession wave in 2009.
Peak Baby Boom started in 1957 and ended in 1961, with an average of 4.3 million births in each of the five years.
If you were born in January 1957, you reached full retirement age in July 2023 and were eligible for your first payment in August 2023. A person born in December 1961 is eligible for their first payment in December 2028.
This means the new exodus out of the labor force and into retirement and into the not-in-labor-force category will last from mid-2023 into 2029, a tsunami crashing out of the economy as these individuals become 66+ and 67 years old in their turn. Full retirement age is 66+6 months for 1957 (2023+), 66+8 months for 1958 (2024+), 66+10 months for 1959 (2025+), and 67 years for 1960 and 1961 (2027, 2028).
This exodus will combine with AI to incentivize reductions in force in corporate America, and we're already witnessing it.
For 2024-26 to date, layoffs have been running ~766k/yr on average annualized ahead of the average 20 million layoffs per year. Announced corporate job cuts late 2024-25 were ~720k, the highest in 15 years.
Trump reductions in force for the federal government at ~250k net contribute but are a sideshow by comparison.
Perhaps fortunately, the Baby Bust of 1973-1976, when annual births crashed to multi-decade lows of 3.1 million per year, means fewer people in their fifties exist to be victimized by AI like Baby Boomers were victimized by the Great Recession in 2009.
But the shrinking talent pool snaking its way through the economy may also be a reason driving AI in the first place.
The problem of unintended consequences is inescapable.
One thing we could fix though is "disabled workers". The Dot Com Bust and The Great Recession didn't suddenly disable anybody, but that's what the data shows.
They exploited a chink in the armor of the Social Security system, and are one big reason the system is teetering.
The Bush and Obama administrations both let it happen because they wouldn't, or couldn't, address the consequences of job loss in a straightforward manner, so they burdened the system instead with a wink, a nod, and an averting of the gaze.
Well, just look at the damn thing. ↓
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| Rush Limbaugh's 106.189 million eating, but not working, a new high, in Trump's America! |
Friday, August 7, 2026
Middle East outbound oil flows through both Straits are back down in the range of 6 million barrels per day if Bab-el-Mandeb is now indeed a return to the pre-war level
It appears that there is nothing extra coming out of the Red Sea anymore, diverted by Saudi Arabia west to Yanbu.
UAE moved 0.95 mbpd through Hormuz in July 2026, but 2.28 mbpd out of Fujairah which doesn't go through Hormuz, which would be in addition to the now ~6 million through Hormuz, yielding 8.28 mbpd approximately, as we speak.
That's 62% off the pre-war level of ~22 mbpd out of the Middle East.
Trump not vanquishing the Houthis in 2025 is America's chickens comin' home to roost.
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