It's Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Initial Claims


Falling productivityAnd this time, I am a part of the initial unemployment claim statistics.

Needless to say, I'm pessimistic, though it should be noted that the fact that I just lost my job, which is not something that inspires confidence.

The number of Americans filing new applications for unemployment benefits increased moderately last week, consistent with steadily easing labor market conditions, though opportunities for those out of work are becoming scarce amid tepid hiring.

Initial claims for state unemployment benefits rose 11,000 to a seasonally adjusted 219,000 for the week ended February 1, the Labor Department said on Thursday. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast 213,000 claims for the latest week.

"There is nothing to worry about here," said Carl Weinberg, chief economist at High Frequency Economics.
Unadjusted claims increased 11,370 to 239,690, with applications in New York soaring by 4,092. Filings rose by 3,999 in California, likely reflecting some residual effects from the recent fires in Los Angeles. Claims dropped by 1,343 in New Jersey. There were no significant increases or decreases for the rest of the states, territories and the District of Columbia

………

Low layoffs are underpinning the labor market, though work opportunities are becoming more scarce for those who are unemployed. The government reported on Tuesday that there were 1.1 job openings for every unemployed person in December, down from 1.15 in November.
The number of people receiving benefits after an initial week of aid, a proxy for hiring, increased 36,000 to a seasonally adjusted 1.886 million during the week ending January 25, the claims report showed.

………

Though business sentiment perked up in the aftermath of Trump's victory in November, hiring plans have remained lackluster amid expectations that demand will slow this year because of still-restrictive monetary policy and higher prices from tariffs.

A report from global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas on Thursday showed U.S. employers announced plans to hire 6,089 workers in January, down 24% from December. Plans were up 13% from January 2024, which was the lowest reading for the month of January on record.

………

Nonfarm productivity, which measures hourly output per worker, increased at a 1.2% annualized rate in the fourth quarter after growing at an upwardly revised 2.3% pace in the July-September quarter.
Economists had forecast productivity would advance at a 1.4% rate after increasing at a previously reported 2.2% pace in the third quarter. Productivity increased at a 1.6% rate from a year ago. It grew 2.3% in 2024, accelerating from 1.6% in 2023.

Productivity has expanded at a 1.8% rate since the fourth quarter of 2019, higher than the 1.5% pace in the prior business cycle that ran from the fourth quarter of 2007 through the fourth quarter of 2019. It is, however, below the long-term rate of 2.1%.

So, hiring is down, (bad for me) and productivity growth is slowing (bad for me).

I am NOT happy right now.

 

What You Do When You Are Losing

Following court hearings where the judge appeared to be EXTREMELY unreceptive to Department of Justice arguments, Trump and his Evil Minions™ have agreed to restrict Elon Musk's access to the US Government payment systems.

Attorneys for the Justice Department have agreed to temporarily restrict staffers associated with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing information in the Treasury Department’s payment system.

The agreement comes after a group of union members and retirees sued the Treasury Department alleging that providing DOGE access to the federal government’s massive payment and collections system — and the personal data housed in it — violated federal privacy laws.

The Trump administration filed a motion Wednesday night seeking to enter a proposed order that detailed the agreed-upon terms.

"The Defendants will not provide access to any payment record or payment system of records maintained by or within the Bureau of the Fiscal Service," the proposed order says.

The order would allow exceptions for two special government employees at the Treasury — Tom Krause and Marko Elez — saying they are permitted access "as needed" to perform their duties, "provided that such access to payment records will be 'read only.'"

The restricted access would remain in effect pending a subsequent hearing on the lawsuit. The judge still needs to sign off on the proposed order.

It's clear that the hope here is that they have done this because otherwise the Judge would be creating an injunction of far wider scope.

Musk's attempt to seize the government's payments system are in violation of federal privacy statutes and open government laws, and possibly more laws besides.

This is f%$#ed up and sh%$.

What a remarkably lawless group of people.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

There is Trump Crazy, and there is Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ crazy, and then there is
proposing the mass expulsion of the Palestinian residents of Gaza to make way for a beach resort development owned by the United States crazy.

This is King Canute ordering the tide to recede* crazy.

I'm thinking that this might be tertiary syphilis.†

Donald Trump’s proposal for a US takeover of Gaza was met with anger and blunt rejection from regional allies, delight from Israel’s far right and a warning against “ethnic cleansing” from the head of the UN.

The secretary general, António Guterres, planned to tell a UN meeting on Wednesday that “it is essential to avoid any form of ethnic cleansing” after the US president said he wanted to “own” Gaza and resettle its Palestinian residents elsewhere.


An unusually broad wave of international outrage and condemnation followed Trump’s shock announcement after a meeting with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Germany warned that the plan violated international law and Brazil’s president described it as “incomprehensible”, with China stating it opposed “forced transfer”.

………

Both regional critics and supporters recognised that Trump’s vision for a “Riviera for the Middle East” was novel only in seeking to insert the US directly into the heart of one of the most volatile, long-running conflicts in the world.

It is premised on emptying Gaza of its residents, effectively a call for ethnic cleansing, and follows decades of debates in the Israeli right over whether Palestinians can be forced from the territory or encouraged to leave with economic incentives.


Trump wants neighbouring countries that are heavily dependent on US aid and military support, including Egypt and Jordan, to offer new homes to large numbers of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents.

I assume that he wants the resorts to be operated by the Trump Org.

This is completely insane.

^*Canute did issue such an order, but it a way to rebuke cortiers who were to adulatory of him. He was showing them that his power was not absolute.

^†No, I don't believe this.  I am not suggesting that I actually see any signs of syphilis. I'm an engineer, not a doctor, dammit. This is sarcasm for effect

About Right, I Think

Former New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez (D) has been sentenced to 11 years in prison for corruption.

Seeing as how people jailed for federal crimes typically serve 85% of their sentence, this would have him in jail for about 9 years and 4 months.

Seems about right to me:

Former U.S. senator Bob Menendez on Wednesday was sentenced to 11 years in prison for operating what prosecutors called one of the most brazen corruption schemes in the country’s history, with bribes totaling nearly $1 million in cash, checks, gold bars and a Mercedes-Benz.

The longtime New Jersey lawmaker was convicted of all charges last year in Manhattan federal court, forcing his resignation after nearly 18 years in the Senate and a half-century in politics. A jury found that Menendez took bribes from three New Jersey businessmen who sought his help quashing criminal investigations and securing lucrative deals with officials from Egypt and Qatar. He is appealing.

Menendez, 71, is the first public official in the United States to be convicted of acting as a foreign agent. Text messages and emails showed how he maneuvered to get U.S. military aid and sensitive, unclassified information to Egypt between 2018 and 2022 from his powerful perch as the highest-ranking Democratic member and later chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

It took long enough. 

I know that corruption is common in the toxic waste Garden State, but this has been an open secret for well over a decade.

F%$# Me, I Agree with a WSJ Editorial (I miss "Say F%$# January)

To be fair, they lauded Elizabeth Warren's take-down of RFK, Jr., so I do not feel bad about being on the same side of the issue.

Still, it is a, "Human sacrifice. Dogs and cats living together. Mass hysteria!" moment:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pledged during his confirmation hearing on Wednesday to root out corruption between industry and government. Yet the man who wants to be the nation’s Secretary of Health and Human Services refused to rule out personally making money from lawsuits against drug makers. This ought to be disqualifying. 

“You just said that you want the American people to know you can’t be bought, your decisions won’t depend on how much money you could make in the future, you won’t go to work for a drug company after you leave HHS,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren said. “But you and I both know there’s another way to make money.” Ah, yes. A fellow friend of trial lawyers, Ms. Warren knows their playbook.

Yeah, they gotta make a swipe at, "Trial Lawyers," because rat-f%$#ers gotta rat-f%$#. ((I REALLY miss "Say F%$# January)

Mr. Kennedy’s disclosures show that he has received more than $2.5 million from law firms that have sued drug and vaccine makers. He also has a financial stake in a pending lawsuit against human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine maker Merck. Mr. Kennedy’s trial-lawyer ties and financial interests in litigation against drug makers pose a clear conflict of interest.

Ms. Warren asked RFK Jr. to commit to not “suing the drug companies, and taking your rake out of that, while you are Secretary and for four years after.” He refused. “You’re asking me to not sue drug companies, and I am not going to agree to that,” he said. Why not?

………

We never thought we’d hear [I think that they mean, "say," not, "here".] this, but Ms. Warren has an excellent point that Mr. Kennedy, as HHS Secretary, could have the ability to “kill off access to vaccines and make millions of dollars while he does it.” This ought to trouble Republican Senators who profess to care about good government and public health.

We live in strange times.

Also, RFK, Jr. is a corrupt con man whose anti-vaccine crusade has been about enriching RFJ, Jr. more than anything else.

D'oh!

What happens when you realize that you have not updated your resume in 4 years.

Well, this sucks.

The Endgame

A fight is brewing in the EU over returning to Russian gas supplies after the war in the Ukraine ends.

The Baltics and Poland are opposed, while 

European officials are debating whether Russian pipeline gas sales to the EU should be restarted as part of a potential settlement to end the war against Ukraine, according to people familiar with discussions.

Advocates of buying Russian gas argue it would bring down high energy prices in Europe, encourage Moscow to the negotiating table, and give both sides a reason to implement and maintain a ceasefire.

But raising the idea of reopening flows of Russian gas into Europe, even in preliminary discussions, has already sparked a backlash among Ukraine’s closest allies in the EU.

Three of the officials briefed on the talks said the idea had been endorsed by some German and Hungarian officials, with support from other capitals that saw it as a way to reduce European energy costs. 

………

Floating the resumption of pipeline sales from Russia has infuriated Brussels officials and diplomats from some eastern European countries, many of whom have spent the past three years working to reduce the amount of Russian energy being imported into the bloc.

Not sure how this is going to shake out, but it's clear that heavy industry in Europe has been absolutely hammered by high energy prices, and the high price of LNG imports does not help.

It is going to be interesting to see where this all goes.
 

About USAID

Notwithstanding attempts to portray the office and its staff as hippie freaks singing kumbaya, USAID has always been an instrument of the most brutal aspects of US foreign policy.

When I think of USAID, I think of Dan Mitrione, the USAID contractor who taught torture techniques to Latin America juntas, using homeless subjects as human guinea pigs for live demonstrations. Mitrione was only stopped when Tupamaro rebels in Uruguay kidnapped & executed him. pic.twitter.com/SDbaIMsREK

— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) February 3, 2025

It would seem to me that USAID, and its fairly obvious role in regime changed, torture, and the like would be something that Donald Trump and President Musk would like.

The funding for disease prevention and the rest is just a cover.

Grimmest Thing Ever in The Onion

Like most of the things in The Onion, this is funny in no small part because it is true.

This article, titled, "No Matter How Many Chili Cook-Offs I Win, Everyone Still Sees Me As ‘That School Shooter’s Mom’," is incredibly dark humor.

This humor is so dark that Derek Chauvin would suffocate it to death.

This humor is so dark that Michael Slager would have shot it in the back.

This humor is so dark that ……… Well, you get the point.

Quote of the Day

[OpenAI Chief Sam] Altman is, in essence, the Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf [Baghdad Bob] of tech — the Saddam-era Iraqi Minister of Information who, as Abrams tanks entered Baghdad and gunfire could be heard in the background, proclaimed an entirely counterfactual world where the coalition forces weren’t merely losing, but American troops were “committing suicide by the hundreds on the gates of Baghdad.” It’s adorable, and yes, it’s also understandable, but nobody should — or could — believe that OpenAI hasn’t just suffered some form of existential wound.

—Edward Zitron, on the shock from DeepSeek's efficient and competitive AI model shows that, "The American tech industry is incurious, lazy, entitled, directionless and irresponsible.

I have always said that the enormous capital demanded by LLM artificial intelligence is a feature, not a bug.

Their goal was to use the enormous investment that they were demanding to create a moat around the field which they could then use to extort monopoly rents.

Not any more.

An Old Classic Sees New Interested

During WWII, the OSS, the progenitor of the CIA came up with a manual explaining how to disrupt and sabotage organizations.

Basically, it came down to being an officious asshole.

It is seeing a lot more popular these days:

A declassified World War II-era government guide to “simple sabotage” is currently one of the most popular open source books on the internet. The book, called “Simple Sabotage Field Manual,” was declassified in 2008 by the CIA and “describes ways to train normal people to be purposefully annoying telephone operators, dysfunctional train conductors, befuddling middle managers, blundering factory workers, unruly movie theater patrons, and so on. In other words, teaching people to do their jobs badly.”

Over the last week, the guide has surged to become the 5th-most-accessed book on Project Gutenberg, an open source repository of free and public domain ebooks. It is also the fifth most popular ebook on the site over the last 30 days, having been accessed nearly 60,000 times over the last month (just behind Romeo and Juliet).

………

Because it was written during active wartime, the book includes various suggestions for causing physical violence and destruction, such as starting fires, flooding warehouses, breaking tools, etc. But it also includes many suggestions for how to just generally be annoying within a bureaucracy or office setting. Simple sabotage ideas include:

• “Insist on doing everything through ‘channels.’ Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.”
• “Make ‘speeches.’ Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your ‘points’ by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate ‘patriotic’ comments.”
• “Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.”
• “Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.”
• “‘Misunderstand’ orders. Ask endless questions or engage in long correspondence about such orders. Quibble over them when you can.”
• “In making work assignments, always sign out the unimportant jobs first. See that the important jobs are assigned to inefficient workers of poor machines.”
• “To lower morale and with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions. Discriminate against efficient workers; complain unjustly about their work.”
• “Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.”
• “Multiply paperwork in plausible ways.”
• “Make mistakes in quantities of material when you are copying orders. Confuse similar names. Use wrong addresses.”
• “Work slowly. Think out ways to increase the number of movements necessary on your job”
• “Pretend that instructions are hard to understand, and ask to have them repeated more than once. Or pretend that you are particularly anxious to do your work, and pester the foreman with unnecessary questions.”
• “Snarl up administration in every possible way. Fill out forms illegibly so that they will have to be done over; make mistakes or omit requested information in forms.”

I know what some of you are thinking, "These techniques were developed to fight Nazis who occupied their countries.  Is this really necessary?"

The answer is YES.

Of Course They Are

Following much ass-kissing of Trump, the DoJ is looking to drop corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams.

I'm disappointed, but not surprised: 

Senior Justice Department officials under President Trump have held discussions with federal prosecutors in Manhattan about the possibility of dropping their corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams of New York, according to five people with knowledge of the matter.

The officials have also spoken to Mr. Adams’s defense team since Mr. Trump took office, the people said. The defense team is led by Alex Spiro, who is also the personal lawyer for Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and one of the president’s closest advisers.

Mr. Trump has the power to pardon Mr. Adams, who as New York City’s mayor could aid his plans for mass deportations. In December, Mr. Trump said that the mayor had been treated “pretty unfairly” by prosecutors and suggested he was considering issuing a pardon.

But if prosecutors were to dismiss the case entirely, it could allow Mr. Adams to insist on his innocence to voters as he seeks another term as mayor, while allowing Mr. Trump to avoid the appearance of a pardon that many might view as unwarranted.

………

Mr. Adams was indicted in September on charges including bribery, fraud and soliciting illegal foreign campaign contributions after an investigation that began in 2021. He has pleaded not guilty, maintained his innocence and contended that he is being prosecuted because he criticized the Biden administration’s immigration policies as New York has received a historic influx of migrants. Federal prosecutors have firmly rebutted that claim.

It's going to take years to dig us all out of the sh%$ that Donald Trump has piled on us in just the past 11 days.

News You Can Use

According to Gizmodo, and I have tested it, and it works, "Add F*cking to Your Google Searches to Neutralize AI Summaries."

Useful to know, because I do not f%$#ing want Google's f%$#ing AI summaries.

They are f%$#ing inaccurate and even more f%$#ing annoying than than they are f%$#ing inaccurate. 

If you are tired of Google’s AI-powered search results leading you astray with poor information from bad sources, there is some good news. It turns out that if you include any expletives in your search query, Google will not return an AI Overview, as they are called, at the top of the results page.

For instance, if you search “How large is the student body of Yale University?” the search results page will return a large AI-generated blurb above the blue links. If you instead search, “How large is the f%$#ing student body at Yale University?” you will instead get a standard list of blue link results, sans-AI summary.

(%$# mine)

As an FYI, damn, hell, and the C-Word  (Don't use it ever) work too.

It's the End of, "Say Fuck January."

Given what has happened in just since the inverted traffic cone was inaugurated, I need to say fuck, shit, motherfucker, and the like more and more often, but I am going back to expurgating the words.

At least as long as I can f%$#ing stand it.

I will, however, use the word felch in unexpurgated form.

This is Not Good

The career civil servant who was acting Secretary of the Treasury, David Lebryk has quit after Elon Musk and his stooges took control of the federal payments system.

So Musk will be in control the check writing capability of the United States while having total access to all of the all the personal information of the recipients.

It is not reassuring that a man whose wealth is largely a product of what John Kenneth Galbraith called, "The Bezzle,"* has this power.

The highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department left the agency after a clash with allies of billionaire Elon Musk over access to sensitive payment systems, according to three people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private talks.

David A. Lebryk, who served in nonpolitical roles at Treasury for several decades, announced his retirement Friday in an email to colleagues that was obtained by The Washington Post. President Donald Trump named Lebryk acting secretary upon taking office last week. Lebryk had a dispute with Musk’s surrogates over access to the payment system the U.S. government uses to disburse trillions of dollars every year, the people said. The exact nature of the disagreement was not immediately clear, they said.

Officials affiliated with Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” have been asking since after the election for access to the system, the people said — requests that were reiterated more recently, including after Trump’s inauguration. Tom Krause, a Silicon Valley executive who has now been detailed to Treasury, is among those involved, the people said. Krause did not respond to requests for comment.

………

When Scott Bessent was confirmed as treasury secretary on Monday, Lebryk ceased to be the acting agency head. Trump administration officials placed Lebryk on administrative leave before he announced he would step down, two of the people said. 

………

Typically only a small number of career officials control Treasury’s payment systems. Run by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the sensitive systems control the flow of more than $6 trillion annually to households, businesses and more nationwide. Tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people across the country rely on the systems, which are responsible for distributing Social Security and Medicare benefits, salaries for federal personnel, payments to government contractors and grant recipients, and tax refunds, among tens of thousands of other functions. 

………

The executive order Trump signed creating DOGE also instructed all agencies to ensure it has “full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems,” which would appear to include the Treasury payment systems.

It is unclear precisely why Musk’s team sought access to those systems. But both Musk and the Trump administration more broadly have sought to control spending in ways that far exceed efforts by their predecessors and have alarmed legal experts.

………

Still, the possibility that government officials might try to use the federal payments system — which essentially functions as the nation’s checkbook — to enact a political agenda is unprecedented, said Mark Mazur, who served in senior Treasury Department roles during the Obama and Biden administrations.

“This is a mechanical job — they pay Social Security benefits, they pay vendors, whatever. It’s not one where there’s a role for nonmechanical things, at least from the career standpoint. Your whole job is to pay the bills as they’re due,” Mazur said. “It’s never been used in a way to execute a partisan agenda. … You have to really put bad intentions in place for that to be the case.”

Bad intentions are a given for this bunch.

There is no easier way to prove that the government does not work than to stop cutting checks.

Then, Trump and President Musk will privatize the system, which will take months, if not years to come to fruition, and one of Elon's friends will be taking a cut of every payment.

These failures will be used to justify draconian cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

We are fucked.

^*In his book The Great Crash, Galbraith describes the bezzle as follows:

Alone among the various forms of larceny [embezzlement] has a time parameter. Weeks, months or years may elapse between the commission of the crime and its discovery. (This is a period, incidentally, when the embezzler has his gain and the man who has been embezzled, oddly enough, feels no loss. There is a net increase in psychic wealth.) At any given time there exists an inventory of undiscovered embezzlement in—or more precisely not in—the country’s business and banks.

This inventory—it should perhaps be called the bezzle—amounts at any moment to many millions of dollars. It also varies in size with the business cycle. In good times, people are relaxed, trusting, and money is plentiful. But even though money is plentiful, there are always many people who need more. Under these circumstances, the rate of embezzlement grows, the rate of discovery falls off, and the bezzle increases rapidly. In depression, all this is reversed. Money is watched with a narrow, suspicious eye. The man who handles it is assumed to be dishonest until he proves himself otherwise. Audits are penetrating and meticulous. Commercial morality is enormously improved. The bezzle shrinks.

About that Plane Crash

Donald Trump's response to the mid air collision over the Potomac was to blame it on too many minorities working as air traffic controllers.

This is ludicrous, of course, but that doesn't matter for Trump and his Evil Minions™.

Trump's FAA has called bullshit on the anti-DEI narrative.

A preliminary report on Wednesday night’s plane and helicopter collision near Washington, D.C. contradicts Donald Trump’s favorite DEI scapegoat.

An internal report from the Federal Aviation Administration found that in reality, the tower’s staffing at Ronald Reagan National Airport (DCA) was “not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic,” according to The New York Times. There was only one air traffic controller to handle both helicopters and planes in the airport’s vicinity, a job usually assigned to two people.

Having to handle both types of air traffic can be complicated, the Times report states, because air traffic controllers can use different radio frequencies for helicopter and airplane pilots. In such cases, while the controller is communicating with pilots of both kinds of aircraft, the pilots may not be able to talk to one another.

Also, it appear that the helicopter was out of position.

There were two pilots flying the helo, and one of them, Andrew Eaves, was a white man.

The other pilot, a woman, has not had her name released at the request of her family, probably because we know that Trump would blame her, and his acolytes would then doxx the family.

Well, Shit

Significant layoffs at my place of work, including my immediate supervisor and me.

This sucks wet farts from wet pigeons.

Posted via mobile.

I Did Nazi This Coming

The Anglican Catholic Church, a conservative sect that split off from the Anglican/Episcopal Church (Catholic in this case is an adjective meaning universal) has defrocked one of their priests for giving a Nazi Salute during a speech.

Given said cleric's close ties to UKIP, I'm not surprised that he went all, "Seig Heil," though I am surprised that the church acted quickly and decisively: 

The Anglican Catholic Church said it had revoked the license of one of its priests Wednesday after he delivered “a gesture that many have interpreted as a pro-Nazi salute” at the National Pro-Life Summit in Washington days earlier.

Calvin Robinson, who had recently started work at St. Paul’s Anglican Catholic Church in Michigan, said his action was intended to imitate Elon Musk’s inauguration hand gesture that critics contended was a Nazi salute, which Musk has denied.

“I gave a talk at a pro-life event that seemed to go down well,” Robinson said on X. “The joke at the end was a mockery of the hysterical ‘liberals’ who called Elon Musk a Nazi for quite clearly showing the audience his heart was with them.”

Robinson, who maintains a large social media presence and was billed at the summit as a conservative commentator, declined to comment Thursday. The Anglican Catholic Church said in a statement that Robinson previously “had been warned that online trolling and other such actions (whether in service of the left or right) are incompatible with a priestly vocation and was told to desist.”

“Clearly, he has not, and as such, his license in this Church has been revoked,” the statement reads. “And we believe that those who mimic the Nazi salute, even as a joke or an attempt to troll their opponents, trivialize the horror of the Holocaust and diminish the sacrifice of those who fought against its perpetrators.”

When the fucking ACC has a better, more honest, and braver response to this than does the media or the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment), we are in a world of hurt.

It's Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The lede here has to be that the Federal Reserve did not lower interest rates yesterday for the first time in about 5 months. (Unsurprisingly, Donald Trump has completely lost his shit over this.)

The Federal Reserve hit the pause button on recent interest rate cuts, entering a new wait-and-see phase as it tries to determine whether and how much more to lower rates from a recent two-decade high.

The decision on Wednesday to leave the benchmark federal-funds rate at its current range around 4.3% followed three consecutive rate cuts beginning in September, when the rate stood around 5.3%.

Officials made only minor changes to the policy statement they released at the conclusion of their two-day meeting. The statement indicated comfort with their interest-rate stance for an economy where inflation remains somewhat above their goal and where labor market conditions have been solid.

………

A widely watched gauge of so-called core inflation, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, rose 2.8% in November from a year earlier and is likely to sit at the same level for the 12 months ended December. 

Because inflation was unusually strong during the first quarter of 2024, mild readings of inflation over the coming months could lead 12-month measures to drop significantly as the high readings of one year ago are replaced with lower ones. For example, if core prices in January, February and March rise at a 0.19% month-over-month rate (their monthly average since April), then year-over-year inflation would slow to 2.3% in March.

That last bit is math 101. 

My guess is that one of the big reasons for the pause is because the Federal Reserve has no fucking where the Trump administration is going on the budget and the economy.

In more general economic terms, and likely one reason that the Fed forbore rate cuts is because, 4th quarter GDP was quite strong, with the economy growing at a 2.3% annual rate, largely because of large increases in consumer spending.

This is down from the 3rd quarter's 3.1% rate, and it's lower than the forecast of 2.6%, but it is still fairly strong.

Further reinforcing this is the fact that today's unemployment report was pretty strong, with initial claims falling by 16,000 to 207,000, and continuing claims falling by  39, 000 to 1.89 million.

I think that everyone is waiting to see how fucking insane Trump's economic and fiscal plans are.

Ecch (Tweet) of the Day

President Xi please save us from Adobe's ridiculous monthly subscription charges and shitty policies! https://t.co/XAaIuRu7qd

— Brad Sigal (@BradSigal) January 29, 2025

Yeah, if Chinese company does to Adobe what DeepSeek did to OpenAI, I will fucking buy, and fucking read, Mao Zedong's Little Red Book, and post a video of me doing a chapter by chapter interpretive dance of its contents.

Suggestions as to costumes for the dance can be posted below, but please consider that I am a fat hairy motherfucker.

oshit

Story still breaking, but it appears that a regional jet flying helicopter after taking off from Washington National Airport.

Update:

The collision was caught on video: (at about 2 minutes)

Further update:

Plane was inbound from Wichita, KS, and the helicopter was an army UH-60 Blackhawk.

Bodies have been recovered but no survivors yet.

Parent Murderer Asks for Mercy as an Orphan

Oh I'm sorry, are you crying? Are you crying because your plagiarism machine that made stuff by copying everybody's stuff was used to train another machine that made stuff by copying stuff? Are you going to cry? Cowards, losers, pathetic pic.twitter.com/Xl4JwWXBaW

— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) January 29, 2025

Ed Zitron owes me a screen wipe

OK, it's not an actual parent murderer, it's Sam Altman and OpenAI accusing DeepSeek of using its model to train their AI program.

I don't ascribe to the extreme view of IP that has people like Sarah Silverman, Christopher Golden, George R.R. Martin, and John Grisham that learning from copyrighted works is a violation of copyright, and I do not believe that LLM models are actually learning, (a pox on both their houses) but OpenAI is accusing DeepSeek of doing exactly what they have been doing since their founding.

Goose, gander, sauce:

OpenAI says it has found evidence that Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek used the US company’s proprietary models to train its own open-source competitor, as concerns grow over a potential breach of intellectual property.

The San Francisco-based ChatGPT maker told the Financial Times it had seen some evidence of “distillation”, which it suspects to be from DeepSeek.

………

Distillation is a common practice in the industry but the concern was that DeepSeek may be doing it to build its own rival model, which is a breach of OpenAI’s terms of service.

Yeah, that is exactly what Altman/OpenAI has been accused of doing.

Go fuck yourself, SAM.

………

OpenAI declined to comment further or provide details of its evidence. Its terms of service state users cannot “copy” any of its services or “use output to develop models that compete with OpenAI”.

Yeah, well they aren't competing.  They are opensourcing their stuff.

DeepSeek’s release of its R1 reasoning model has surprised markets, as well as investors and technology companies in Silicon Valley. Its built-on-a-shoestring models have attained high rankings and comparable results to leading US models.

………

The practice highlights the difficulty for companies keen to protect their technical edge. “We know [China]-based companies — and others — are constantly trying to distil the models of leading US AI companies,” OpenAI said in its latest statement.

By, "Protect their technical edge," OpenAI and its ilk mean, "Extract monopoly rents."

I'd love to see the big LLM companies go down in flames before the VC's have a chance to cash out and dump their stock on clueless low level investors.

Many reported on Nancy Pelosi dumping millions worth of Nvidia ahead of the DeepSeek fallout.

But very few noticed she bought into Tempus AI, a healthcare AI stock that’s nearly doubled in price since her investment.

Why? Because she is betting on Americans getting sicker. 🤨 pic.twitter.com/AvoLnz4s3Q

— James Li (@5149jamesli) January 28, 2025

I know that I might be stating the obvious, and it is something studiously ignored by the Very Serious People™, but Nancy Pelosi is incredibly corrupt, even if she is not technically breaking any laws.

The cynic in me would suggest that the reason that the Democratic gerontocracy in Congress is so loathe to relinquish power is because it allows them to make large amounts money for themselves and their families.

I'm Feeling Exhausted Too

Just trying to follow all of the Trump administration's outrages, is exhausting.

Actually coming up with cogent commentary (for me, admittedly a pretty low bar) is a challenge.

I am working on this.

It's a Fart Story, so I Write About It, OK?

It appears that the Royal Navy went on high alert in response to whale farts.

Burritos need to be kept far away from the Royal Navy:

The Royal Navy of the United Kingdom started a frenzied hunt for phantom Russians off the coast after hearing two weird sounds in the water, only to discover that the noises were caused by a gassy whale, an official told The Sun.

Naval authorities were concerned that one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s drone submarines had placed a listening device on the ocean floor between two Scottish islands, launching an inquiry.

The two toots were discovered around 100 miles from where the UK’s doomsday submarines are located.

“We have been analyzing the sounds and now believe it was a marine mammal. A whale” the officer informed the British tabloid.

The sound, initially identified by analysts as a man-made noise, had never before been detected by the sensors, causing the navy to misinterpret Das Boof for Das Boot, according to the article.

Not to toot my own horn (no apologies for that turn of phrase), but I like to think of myself as the go to source for flatulence related news.

Guillotines for Sale!

Order now, demand is spiking.

In a surprise to my reader(s) I am not talking about the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™, I'm referring to Mark Andreeson, who is arguing that must make everyone (but him) completely destitute to achieve utopia.

He has explicitly stated that his goal for the world is to reduce wages of everyone (but him) to basically nothing:

Marc Andreessen, cofounder of the massive venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz — which has its fingers in pretty much every pie in tech — has revealed an eyebrow-raising detail in his "techno-optimist" vision of the future.

In a recent tweet, the American billionaire investor casually proclaimed that AI must "crash" everyone's wages before it can deliver us an economic utopia — one that'll definitely happen, and certainly not create a permanent underclass of have-nots.

"A world in which human wages crash from AI — logically, necessarily — is a world in which productivity growth goes through the roof, and prices for goods and services crash to near zero," Andreessen wrote. "Consumer cornucopia. Everything you need and want for pennies."

So fret not, lowly laborer: you may be destined for financial ruin, but paradise is right around the corner. Pinky promise.

………

Andreessen's tweet is a revealing example of the ruthless economic logic that underlies tech moguls' utopic visions of the future, in which progress is a foregone conclusion, rendering everyone's economic suffering in the interim merely a means to an end. Like overzealous fitness instructors, they always choose to emphasize the need for pain to achieve anything.

………

Above all, many of these ultra-rich tech types like Andreessen can't help publicly fantasizing about punishing the poor.

Larry Ellison for instance, cofounder of the software outfit Oracle, drooled about how AI would supercharge the surveillance state, ensuring that "citizens will be on their best behavior."

These folks are the problem, not the solution.

The only good news is that rat-fucks like Mark Andreeson went all in on AI, and they are taking a bath now that Deepseek's incredibly inexpensive artificial intelligence has eaten Big AI's lunch.

Ecch (Tweet) of the Day

The fact that, following the DeepSeek ascendancy, uranium stocks fell 11% (on the 'fears' that the vast expansion of data centres may be unnecessary, rendering nuclear power less attractive), reveals how deeply in the void of madness the stock market had fallen...

— Yanis Varoufakis (@yanisvaroufakis) January 28, 2025

Yeah, this whole panic, and the whole mania before this, is fucked up and shit.

Support Your Local Police

2 police officers in St. Louis have been fired, and have had their peace officers licenses revoked after they did nothing to aid a gunshot victim because they found it inconvenient.

It should be noted here that the Supreme Court has ruled that there is no duty for police officers to protect you, (Castle Rock v. Gonzales) but officials in St. Louis and in Missouri have (IMHO correctly) decided that the officers behavior was beyond the pale:

Urayoan Alejandro Rodriguez-Rivera called St. Louis police at 6:13 p.m. on Sept. 10, 2023, to tell them he was going to kill himself. By the time two officers found him in Forest Park 13 minutes later, he had shot himself in the head and was clinging to life.

At first, the officers thought the 29-year-old was dead, body-camera footage shows. Then they discovered he was still breathing — barely.

“We need to take this [guy], then,” said Ty Warren, who according to authorities was referring to the need to take responsibility for the call and write reports about what happened.

“We ain’t taking this [mess],” his partner, Austin Fraser, replied, according to the Missouri Attorney General’s Office. “Let’s cruise around and come back.”

Fraser and Warren didn’t try to give Rodriguez-Rivera any medical help, Assistant Attorney General David Hansen alleged in a disciplinary complaint. They didn’t tell dispatch that they had found him or that he needed an ambulance. They didn’t try to find the gun he had been shot with.

Instead, one minute after finding Rodriguez-Rivera, the officers left him, exiting the park and returning to their patrol vehicle as they laughed and joked around with each other, Warren’s body-cam footage shows. They returned minutes later, pretending to stumble upon Rodriguez-Rivera’s body for the first time as another officer called for an ambulance and took the lead on the call.

Within days, the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department fired Fraser, and within weeks, Warren had also left the department. Fraser’s peace officer license was revoked earlier this month, after Warren’s had already been — meaning they can no longer work as law enforcement officers anywhere in the state, said Mike O’Connell, spokesman for the Missouri Department of Public Safety.

The Missouri attorney general’s office accused the former officers of violating two statutes: gross misconduct and committing an act of “reckless disregard.”

Pre-George Floyd, I do not think that much would have happened to these officers.

Progress, I guess, but these guys should be in jail.

Another Reddit Protest

In this case, Reddit management is not disciplining the moderators of the SubReddits, they are just litting it slide.

What are these mods have done is to ban links from Ecch (Twitter) on their discussions.

This is big deal, because it has the effect of shutting down a lot of the distribution of links on Ecch (Twitter). 

Scores of Reddit’s online communities have banned the posting of links from the social media platform X in protest of owner Elon Musk’s inauguration hand gesture that critics contend was a Nazi salute.

Among the most notable subreddits to ban X links are the sports discussion hubs r/NFL and r/NBA, which have 12 million and 15 million subscribers respectively, along with the women’s issues and news subreddit r/TwoXChromosomes, which has 14 million members.

………

Reddit is a social media platform that has more than 97 million daily active users. It’s made up of individual communities, called subreddits, which are typically centered on specific interests. Users can subscribe to their preferred subreddits, which have their own volunteer moderators that establish and enforce their own rules beyond Reddit’s sitewide regulations. Subreddits related to properties (such as sports teams or TV shows) are nearly always run by fans and not affiliated with the property itself.

A Reddit spokeswoman confirmed Thursday that the website itself has no ban on links from X and restated the company’s commitment to freedom of speech.

Among the first subreddits to ban X links after Musk’s Monday speech was r/NewJersey. Its users have been taking a victory lap, sharing posts crediting the community with starting the trend.

Other state subreddits, including r/Georgia and r/Massachusetts, have followed suit. Topic subreddits including r/antiwork, which has nearly 3 million members, and r/Christianity and r/Military, which each have around a half-million members, also banned X links. 

I believe that this is a, "Fuck Around and Find Out," (FAFO) moment.

Good Move from ……… Georgia?

I am referring to the, "Peach State," and not the former Soviet Republic on the Black Sea.

Their PUC just issued a rule allowing Georgia Power to charge data centers higher rates for electricity.

Considering the negative externalities of data centers, this is a very good idea:

Metro Atlanta is one of the hottest destinations in the country for tech companies to build data centers, hulking warehouses filled with servers that power web services, cryptocurrency transactions and increasingly, artificial intelligence.

But the facilities themselves use huge amounts of electricity, and concern has been growing that their demands could strain the grid and drive up costs for residential customers and other businesses.

On Thursday, the Georgia Public Service Commission approved changes to Georgia Power’s rules and contract provisions commissioners say will make sure data centers pay their fair share and keep other customers from being saddled with their costs.

………

The changes were proposed by Georgia Power in December and apply to new customers that use more than 100 megawatts of electricity.

………

Already, Georgia Power has been approved to build new oil- and gas-burning units, add massive battery storage systems and buy power from coal and gas plants in other states, largely to meet a wave of data-center demand the company contends is coming.

Those projects, along with building new transmission lines to deliver the power, carry enormous costs, which some fear could be passed on to the company’s other customers, whose rates have shot up dramatically in recent years. Since late 2022, the PSC has approved a series of rate increases that have pushed the average Georgia Power customer’s bill up by about $43, according to data from the company.

Nice to see the big players being made to paid some of the costs that they inflict on the rest of us.  (That's the definition of, "Negative Externalities.)

Yeah, That Will Show Them

Remember how I said that the ADL was letting Elon Musk's Nazi salute slide?

Well, they have finally made a statement, well, just a strongly worded Ecch (Tweet) condemning the Nazi jokes he wrote as a followup to his Nazi salute.

Weak tea, Kapos, very week tea.

Of Course They Did

Is anyone surprised that the US Air Force stopped showing videos about the Tuskegee Airmen and the WASPs because it's DEI. (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion)

The Air Force has pulled and is reviewing a basic military training course that includes videos on the history of pioneering Black and female pilots during World War II, following President Donald Trump’s order to halt diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

The unofficial Facebook page Air Force amn/nco/snco on Friday night posted an excerpt of an internal Air Force message, which said videos on the Tuskegee Airmen and Women’s Airforce Service Pilots, or WASPs, had been removed from the service’s BMT course.

“In accordance with NEW DEIA [diversity, equity, inclusion and acceptance] Guidance the lesson plans listed below have been changed/alternated to meet the guidance,” the leaked internal message said, adding that the revised lessons should be used “immediately,” with the final word underlined and in bold.

An Air Force official told Air Force Times the videos themselves were not targeted for removal, but BMT classes that include diversity materials were pulled and are now under review to make sure they are in compliance with this week’s executive orders.

One of those classes, a one-day program titled “Airmindedness,” included videos on the Tuskegee Airmen and WASPs, as well as an inspirational-style recruiting video called “Breaking Barriers.”

This decision was reversed once it starting getting savage press reporting, but if it hadn't blown up, this policy would still be in place.

Effacing any record of minorities in American history is an explicit goals of this rat-fuck.

Some Good News, Though

A federal court has ruled that the abuse of section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is unconstitutional.

The court actually ruled in December, but it's only now being made public:

It's official: The FBI's warrantless searches of communications seized to protect US national security have at last been ruled unconstitutional and in violation of the Fourth Amendment.

In a major December ruling made public this week, US District Judge LaShann DeArcy Hall settled one of the biggest debates about feared government overreach that has prompted calls to reform Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) for more than a decade.

Critics' primary concern was whether the FBI needed a warrant to search and query Americans' communications that are often incidentally, inadvertently, or mistakenly seized during investigations of suspected foreign terrorists.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital rights group that has long said a warrant is needed to conduct such invasive searches, celebrated the ruling as "better late than never." The EFF noted that the FBI conducted 3.4 million warrantless searches of US persons' 702 data in 2021, describing it as a "routine practice" and calling out Section 702 as a "finders keepers" rule that for years has seemingly given feds' unfettered access to many Americans' private and sensitive communication data.

DeArcy Hall agreed with an appeals court that ruled that "the government cannot circumvent application of the warrant requirement simply because queried information is already collected and held by the government," as the US unsuccessfully tried to argue.

I expect this to go all the way to the US Supreme Court, and I have no fucking clue as to how they would rule.

It is clear that the FBI has been abusing the process, which is not a surprise.

It's what cops do.

I Recommend This Reddit

r/LeopardsAteMyFace

'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party.

— Adrian Bott (@Cavalorn) October 16, 2015

Seriously, there are a leopard supporters getting their faces eaten, and given that the next 4 years will be hell, have some schadenfreude.

You see things like this:

Also, in response to denying military deportation flights to ColOmbia, their issue was with the military part, Trump declared retaliatory tariffs on ColUmbia.

I'm not sure if he meant the sportswear company, or the town in Ohio, or the nation's capitol, or the planned community in central Maryland, or the University, or the 20 odd other places with that name.

We are so fucked.

Elon Musk tells far-right AfD rally to not be ashamed of their history - The Washington Post

Elon Musk: "race mixing is bad. Italy for Italians!" *woman next to him moves as far away as possible*

[image or embed]

— The Serfs (@theserfstv.bsky.social) January 26, 2025 at 5:38 PM

Her Reaction Peak Elon

Elon Musk, the child of Apartheid, and (as I have noted earlier) the grandchild of literal Nazis, just gave a speech to an Alternative für Deutschland rally stating that Germans should not be ashamed of the Holocaust.

From the ADL?  **crickets**

Greeted with loud cheers, Elon Musk virtually delivered a short speech Saturday at a rally for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, where he urged the crowd to not be ashamed of their country’s history.

Musk’s appearance comes amid debate over whether a gesture he made twice during an inauguration rally was a Nazi-style salute, which he denies. He was introduced by Alice Weidel, the AfD’s candidate for chancellor. At the rally in Halle, Musk encouraged the roughly 4,500 attendees to be proud of their German heritage.

“There is too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that. Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great-grandparents,” Musk said, seeming to reference the country’s history when the Nazis rose to power.

AfD's goal, and Elon's, goal is to rehabilitate Hitler and Nazis, at least it is if you believe your own eyes.

Musk has always been a con-man.  He is now a clear and present danger to the world.

Of Course They Did

I would file this under, "Did Nazi this coming," but I am not at all surprised that The Tennessee Federation of Republican Women cited Adolph Hitler when recommending a reading list for children.

Of course once it got noticed, it was withdrawn.

Go figure.

The Tennessee Federation of Republican Women is coming under fire for providing parents a reading list for children that cites Adolf Hitler as an example of leadership.

"Hitler and all intelligent leaders throughout history have understood that the way to change a country was through the training of its youth, to get them while they are young," the group's reading list says.

The list, dated March 2024, is titled "Growing American Patriots Through Literacy" and posted on the group's website.

.........

A parents group in Indiana faced a similar controversy in June 2023, citing the German dictator in a newsletter. The newsletter cited Hitler, with the quote, "He alone, who OWNS the youth, GAINS the future."

The Indiana group, a chapter of Moms for Liberty, apologized for including the quote in the newsletter.

To quote Woody Allen: (Yes, I know, I'm quoting Woody Allen, but this says it all)

We should go down there and get some guys together, get some bricks and baseball bats and really explain things to them.

......... 

Well, a satirical piece in the Times is one thing but bricks and baseball bats really gets right to the point.

Tennessee Nazis.  I have Tennessee Nazis. 

So the Drunk and the Dog Killer Got Confirmed

Drunken wife beater Hegseth for Secretary of Defense, and the corrupt dog shooter for head of DHS. 

This is what passes for normal these days.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Posted via mobile.

Interesting

I was at an SCA (Medieval recreation group) event today, and at feast, they were serving various east Asian dishes.

Included in one course was Mongolian salted butter tea.

As an acknowledgement of the western palates at the feast, there was not much salt in the tea, I barely noticed it, but the butter had a rather odd mouth feel.

Posted via mobile.

Interesting

I'm not a huge fan of Paul Krugman. (I dropped him from my blog roll years ago) I've always felt that he was far too supportive of economics, and politics of the Clintons and Barack Obama.

That being said, I still believe that he is honest and that he tells the truth, so his his interview with the Columbia Journalism Review is quite informative.

Basically, he left because the editorial editors were constantly trying to water down his stuff, and were trying to cut down on the articles/newsletters that he put out.

The Opinion Editopr, Kathleen Kingsbury, and the Deputy Opinion Editor, Patrick Healy, deny that any such thing was taking place, for reasons noted above, I am disinclined to believe them.

Krugman spent years as a tenured professor at MIT and Princeton for 30 years, so he knows rat-fucking better than any journalistic rat-fucker could possibly imagine.*

For two and a half decades, Paul Krugman’s columns in the New York Times were beacons of intelligence and common sense. Particularly for progressives inured to the work of many of his colleagues, Krugman offered a liberal gospel that was also a reliable refuge from mediocrity.

He was a reliable refuge from the mediocrity of the New York Times OP/ED page, which, given the continued employment of Tom Friedman, Maureen Dowd, David Brooks, Ross Douthat, Brett "Bedbug" Stephens, David French,  etc.

………

Kingsbury, her deputy, Patrick Healy, and publisher A.G. Sulzberger all told CJR that they wished that Krugman had stayed at the paper—a desire none of them expressed last week, when an internal memo announced that Pamela Paul and Charles M. Blow would soon stop writing their columns.

It is mendacious to suggest that they wish that he had stayed at the paper when they made it clear that they wanted a lot less of him at the paper.

………

Krugman agreed that he could have stayed at the paper. But in an interview, he said the circumstances of his job changed so sharply in 2024 that he decided he had to quit. He had been writing two columns and a newsletter every week, until September, when, Krugman said, Healy told him the newsletter was being killed.

“That was my Network moment,” Krugman said. “‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore’”—a quote from the Howard Beale character in Paddy Chayefsky’s 1976 film.

Kingsbury said it was “patently untrue” that Krugman’s newsletter had been killed, although it stopped appearing last October. She emailed him on September 30 to urge him to stay at the paper, and offered to let him keep the newsletter, but without guaranteeing its weekly frequency. She told him he could “use it to weigh in when you and your editor agree that it’s necessary.” And there was a condition: if he wanted to keep the newsletter, the frequency of his column would have to be cut in half, to once a week.

And then there is this:

………

The offer to reinstate the newsletter did nothing to placate Krugman, who had another serious complaint. “I’ve always been very, very lightly edited on the column,” he said. “And that stopped being the case. The editing became extremely intrusive. It was very much toning down of my voice, toning down of the feel, and a lot of pressure for what I considered false equivalence.” And, increasingly, attempts “to dictate the subject.”

“I approached Mondays and Thursdays with dread,” Krugman continued, “and often spent the afternoon in a rage. Patrick often—not always—rewrote crucial passages; I would then do a rewrite of his rewrite to restore the original sense, and felt that I was putting more work—certainly more emotional energy—into repairing the damage from his editing than I put into writing the original draft. It’s true that nothing was published without my approval; but the back-and-forth, to my eye, both made my life hell and left the columns flat and colorless.”

"Flat and colorless," huh?  That should be the new motto for what Atrios calls, "That fucking newspaper."

Healy denied he had done anything to muffle Krugman’s voice. “He never called or emailed me saying I was changing his meaning or censoring his views, and he never lodged an objection to me that I overrode,” Healy wrote in his email to CJR.

This is an admission that Healy was trying to, "Muffle Krugman's voice." 

This is what happens when you have too many nepobaby failsons running an institution.  (It ain't just "Dash" Sulzberger)

^*To quote Henry Kissinger, "The reason that university politics is so vicious is because stakes are so small."

OK, This is Creepy as Fuck

I know that I have been married to Sharon* for 30 years, but this is freaky weird.

I complained to her that I had another ear worm, but at least it wasn't completely horrible.

She guessed the ear worm and started singing it.

To be fair, I named the group and asked her to guess, and the group was Styx.

And the song was:

Still,there is something profoundly unsettling when someone knows you so well that they can guess your ear-worms.

^*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.