One Step Back from The Handmaiden’s Tale

A federal judge has ruled that Alabama cannot prosecute anyone who helps someone travel out of state for an abortion.

While there have yet to be any such charges filed, the state AG has announced that he is looking into this, so there is already a chilling effect on healthcare providers:

Alabama’s attorney general cannot prosecute individuals and groups that help Alabama women travel to other states to obtain abortions, a federal judge ruled on Monday.

The US district judge Myron Thompson sided with an abortion fund and medical providers who sued Alabama’s attorney general, Steve Marshall, after he suggested they could face prosecution under anti-conspiracy laws. Thompson’s ruling declared that such prosecutions would violate both the first amendment and a person’s right to travel.

Marshall has not pursued any such prosecutions. However, he said he would “look at closely” whether facilitating out-of-state abortions is a violation of Alabama’s criminal conspiracy laws. The ruling was a victory for the Yellowhammer Fund, an abortion assistance fund that had paused providing financial assistance to low-income people in the state because of the possibility of prosecution.

………

“It is one thing for Alabama to outlaw by statute what happens in its own backyard. It is another thing for the state to enforce its values and laws, as chosen by the attorney general, outside its boundaries by punishing its citizens and others who help individuals travel to another state to engage in conduct that is lawful there but the attorney general finds to be contrary to Alabama’s values and laws,” Thompson wrote in the 131-page opinion.

It's like prosecuting people for organizing a trip to Los Vegas, and it i9 clearly unconstitutional.

Or at least it is until the Supreme Court issues yet another corrupt ruling.

Gee, Here is a Surprise

With concerns growing among European nations that the United States might no longer be a reliable supplier of weapons systems, they are attempting to move their defense procurement from the US to European suppliers, and the Trump administration is having major butt hurt over this.

Personally, I'm Ike's (Eisenhower) side on all of this, and I think that the excessive presence of the military industrial complex in our economy is a bad thing, so this change in policy will ultimately be good for both America and Europe:

U.S. officials have told European allies they want them to keep buying American-made arms, amid recent moves by the European Union to limit U.S. manufacturers' participation in weapons tenders, five sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.

The messages delivered by Washington in recent weeks come as the EU takes steps to boost Europe's weapons industry, while potentially limiting purchases of certain types of U.S. arms.

………

Some of the proposed measures could mean a smaller role for non-EU companies, including those based in the U.S. and the United Kingdom, experts say.

In a March 25 meeting, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the foreign ministers of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia that the United States wants to continue participating in EU countries' defense procurements, the sources told Reuters.

According to two of the sources, Rubio said any exclusion of U.S. companies from European tenders would be seen negatively by Washington, which those two sources interpreted as a reference to the proposed EU rules.

I'm not surprised that the Europeans are considering this, both the current economic situation and the erratic nature of Trump foreign policy would tend to encourage such moves.

This is particularly true for some of the more sophisticated US weapons systems, (the F-35) require near real time support from US controlled entities to operate for more than about a week.

The Technical Term for This is Fraud

You may have read that Elon Musk has announced that he has sold Ecch (Twitter) to his artificial intelligence company XAI.

The thing to understand here is that was an all stock transaction, that xAI is privately held, so there is no market price for its stock, and as such, he's basically using magic beans.

This is an attempt to confuse his lenders to delay when they make a margin call and Hoover up the bulk of his stake in Tesla.  (Don't worry, he'll still be worth billions after that)

This is securities fraud, or it would be if we were still enforcing those laws:  (How quaint of me)

Elon Musk announced on Friday that xAI, his artificial intelligence company, had purchased his social media platform X. “xAI and X’s futures are intertwined,” he wrote on X. “Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution, and talent. This combination will unlock immense potential by blending xAI’s advanced A.I. capability and expertise with X’s massive reach.” The all-stock transaction between the two private companies valued xAI at $80 billion [this is a fraud] and X at $33 billion in equity, [this is a fraud] plus $12 billion in debt. [this is a fraud]

The numbers behind Musk’s valuation of X add up to a convenient enterprise value of $45 billion, or $1 billion more than what he paid in 2022 to acquire the company formerly known as Twitter. [this is a fraud]

That Musk would seek to close this chapter of X up $1 billion — notionally, at least — could be a response to critics who say he ran the company aground by decimating its core revenue stream: ad buys from blue-chip companies. Over the past few months, Musk has made a concerted effort to puff up X’s value by claiming a return of the top advertisers who fled the platform after his leveraged buyout. [this is a fraud]

With some top companies resuming advertising on the platform, Musk declared a new $44 billion valuation for X last month, [this is a fraud] even though some X investors valued the company at $12 billion as recently as last December. Musk went on to claim that X had doubled its annual profits since he bought it. [this is a fraud]

The advertisers on Ecch (Twitter), with the exceptions of Chinese firms Temu and Shein (who would advertise on my ass if they knew that there were space available), are small advertisers, and various scammers.  (Particularly crypto scammers)

Ecch (Twitter) has become a haven for scammers, because the Hellsite has refused to investigate them because they need the advertising revenue.

This "Sale" is little more than an attempt to obfuscate the precarious financial position of Musk's Tesla and Ecch (Twitter) holdings from his lenders, and that is pretty clearly fraud.

Tariffs on Flightless Aquatic Fowl

It appears that Donald Trump has has imposed tariffs on uninhabited islands around Antarctica, because penguins are masters of the art of deception.

As Anna Russel would say, "I'm not making this up, you know."

A group of barren, uninhabited volcanic islands near Antarctica, covered in glaciers and home to penguins, has been swept up in Donald Trump’s trade war, as the US president hit them with a 10% tariff on goods.

Heard Island and McDonald Islands, which form an external territory of Australia, are among the remotest places on Earth, accessible only via a two-week boat voyage from Perth on Australia’s west coast. They are completely uninhabited, with the last visit from people believed to be nearly 10 years ago.

Nevertheless, Heard and McDonald islands featured in a list released by the White House of “countries” that would have new trade tariffs imposed.

I'm beginning to think that the morphine addled Hermann Goering could do a better job governing than this sorry lot.

It's Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Continuing Claims


Initial Claims

And initial unemployment claims fell slightly, but continuing claims rose to a 41 month high. (Full disclosure, I am a part of the latters statistic)

U.S. initial jobless claims moved lower last week, according to the Department of Labor, underscoring that there has been no big increase in newly employed workers through the end of March.

The week through March 29 brought 219,000 initial jobless claims, compared with 225,000 a week earlier. Economists polled by The Wall Street Journal had been forecasting 228,000 initial claims.

The number of continuing claims, a gauge of the size of the unemployed population, rose to 1.9 million in the week through March 22, the highest level since November 2021. A week earlier, continuing claims held at 1.85 million. The continuing-claims data lag the data on new filings by a week.

The figures are a final weekly labor-market snapshot before the Labor Department’s full jobs report for March lands on Friday. Economists believe the unemployment rate held steady at 4.1% last month, per the Journal’s survey, and that the economy added 140,000 jobs, a slight slowing from February.

Of more note, at least for this week, is the stock market.

I generally do not consider the stock market as reflective of the economy, but today we saw an absolute bloodbath in the stock market today over trade war concerns.

U.S. markets suffered their steepest declines since 2020 on fears President Trump’s new tariff plans will trigger a global trade war and drag the U.S. economy into recession.

That selloff was triggered by the Covid shut-down.  This is a big f%$#ing deal.

Major stock indexes dropped as much as 6% on Thursday. Stocks lost roughly $3.1 trillion in market value, their largest one-day decline since March 2020. Stock-index futures drifted lower Thursday evening, and stocks in Japan were hit for a second day as Friday trading began.

In Thursday's market plunge, the Dow industrials dropped 1679 points, or 4%. The tech-heavy Nasdaq, which powered the market higher for years, was down 6%, pulled lower by big declines in Nvidia, Apple and Amazon.com. The S&P 500, which fell 4.8%, and the other benchmarks suffered their sharpest declines since the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The dollar meanwhile tumbled, with the WSJ Dollar Index suffering its sharpest decline since 2023. The 1.3% fall brought the greenback to its lowest level since October, a sign of unease over the growth outlook and fears that the flow of funds into the country will be sharply curtailed.

Not good, and it gets worse:

………

Trump took the selloff in stride. “I think it’s going very well,” Trump said in response to a question about his tariffs Thursday afternoon. “The markets are going to boom.” He left the door open to making deals to lower tariffs, while also promising new ones on pharmaceuticals and semiconductors.

Dozens of household-name stocks posted double-digit declines, including HP, Nike and Target. Stellantis also fell sharply. The Jeep maker said it is temporarily halting production at its auto assembly factories in Mexico and Canada.

The turmoil spread beyond stocks, with oil prices dropping more than 6% and investors selling gold after its sharp run over the past year to fresh records.

So Trump is cool with this.  I guess that this makes it all better.

We are f%$#ed.

Headline of the Day

I Won’t Connect My Dishwasher to Your Stupid Cloud

—Jeff Geerling

Here's a hint for Consumer Reports, which top-rated the Bosch 500 series of dishwashers:  If the feature requires an app, it's not a feature, because either the manufacturer will start charging for it, or they will eventually shut down the web service disabling the feature.

The features that are missing without the app?  Minor things like delayed start and rinse.

No one ever used those before the internet of sh%$.

OK, Trump Has Created a Miracle

He has convinced most of the Québécois in Canada that they are Canadians:

This is profoundly odd. 

………

For the first time in my life, I noticed a very strong nationalistic--even patriotic--feeling arise from coast to coast here in Canada. I was speaking with a good friend of mine yesterday, he's a bit older, he's been around like almost 20 years, longer than me, and we were talking about how generally Canadians are not the most patriotic people.

They're not as much keen to flag-waving or public displaying of their national pride, never as much as our southern neighbor anyway.

And that is especially true here in Quebec, where, as I mentioned before, the French-speaking Quebecers are most likely to identify as Quebecer before Canadian, if at all.

But even here, since those declarations, shocking declarations from Donald Trump, we've been noticing that patriotic Canadian pride take over people.

It's really unbelievable. Suddenly, like you're in a grocery store and you see that elderly lady wondering in French, reading the label on the mustard pot, like, "Was this made in Canada? If not, I'm not even buying it."

Personally, I first came to realize that there was something going on when I randomly came across some posts.

You know it's getting serious when Quebecers start feeling patriotic towards Canada.

………

Montreal guy here, born and bred, he made Quebecers patriotic. Do you know to what degree you need to piss off a Quebecer to make them stand up for Canada?

I can't even imagine to what degree you need to piss off a Quebecer to make them stand up for Canada.

Whatever number this is, I believe that it is so big that any tolerance would be on the exponent if you wrote it in scientific notation.  (Something like 3.113 × 10187±4.4. Astronomers frequently put tolerances in exponents.  It's a big f%$#ing number.)

Elections Tonight

We had 2 special elections for US Representatives in Florida, and Republicans won both races, which was not unexpected, but it was far closer than the demographics of this districts would indicate. 

Two Trump-backed Republicans won special congressional elections in Florida on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, shoring up their party’s slim majority in the House at a crucial moment for President Trump’s domestic agenda.

Jimmy Patronis, the state’s chief financial officer, won the race to replace Matt Gaetz in the First Congressional District, on the western end of the Panhandle. With most of the vote counted late Tuesday, Mr. Patronis had won 57 percent.

As Gaetz getting 66.0% in the last election.

And State Senator Randy Fine captured the Sixth District seat that had been held by Michael Waltz, now Mr. Trump’s national security adviser. That district is rooted in Daytona Beach and parts of the northeast coast. Mr. Fine had 56.7 percent of the vote as of 9 p.m.

That's as against Waltz winning the district with 66.5%

This is more than a 10% swing toward the Democratic Party in both cases. 

Heartening, but it's about 18 months until the 2026 elections.

More importantly to my mind is that Susan Crawford won the race for Wisconsin Supreme Court justicee against Elon Musk supported right-wing knuckle-dragger Brad Schimel. 

This is important for a number of reasons:

• It means that Republicans will be limited in their ability to rat-f%$# redistricting and election laws.
• That Wisconsin's laws forbidding manufacturer owned car dealerships, which Musk has managed to secure waivers for in most (all?) of the other states, will likely remain on the books. (Almost every state requires that new cars be sold by independent dealers, and not the manufacturer)

The latter is important because it is a significant loss for Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ who spent millions on an ad blitz and paid hundreds of people for their votes.

The fact that his candidate lost by 11% is a mark of his complete toxicity as both a human being and a political figure.

https://madison.com/news/state-regional/government-politics/elections/article_bbbd2886-ff64-404e-a259-1d4680f42f64.html 

He's Running for President in 2028

That is my take-away of Corry Booker's 25 hour long record breaking speech from the floor of the Senate.

Credit though for the distinguished gentleman from New Jersey's kidneys of steel.

He spent 25 hours lambasting Donald Trump without a bathroom break, breaking Strom Thurmond's record by 1 hour.

I'm not sure that this had much meaning in a greater strategic sense, but at least he is doing something, unlike, for example, Chuck Schumer.