Gee, Ya Think?

It appears that the juxtaposition of electrically conductive seawater flooding and lithium ion car batteries are a fire threat.

Well knock me over with a Model 552AC Zamboni.

Lithium ion battery technolity is highly energetic and it is rather likely to short circuit itself under conditions where charging and discharging are not controlled, like being flooded with salt water:

Flooding from hurricanes Helene and Milton inflicted billions of dollars in damage across the Southeast in September and October 2024, pushing buildings off their foundations and undercutting roads and bridges. It also caused dozens of electric vehicles and other battery-powered objects, such as scooters and golf carts, to catch fire.

According to one tally, 11 electric cars and 48 lithium-ion batteries caught fire after exposure to salty floodwater from Helene. In some cases, these fires spread to homes.

When a lithium-ion battery pack bursts into flames, it releases toxic fumes, burns violently and is extremely hard to put out. Frequently, firefighters’ only option is to let it burn out by itself.

Particularly when these batteries are soaked in saltwater, they can become “ticking time bombs,” in the words of Florida State Fire Marshall Jimmy Patronis. That’s because the fire doesn’t always occur immediately when the battery is flooded. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, about 36 EVs flooded by Hurricane Ian in Florida in 2022 caught fire, including several that were being towed after the storm on flatbed trailers.

This is precisely the area where government regulation would be a good idea.

Cars bursting into flame post hurricane is not a good thing.

These regulations could cover things water tightness of the cells, resistance to corrosion, and possibly automatic controlled discharge devices.

Of course, this won't happen, because it would be socialism.

Shut Up and Take My Money

PC case-maker SilverStone made an April Fools’ joke touting a fake retro PC case.

They shared some renderings of the product.

Response to this joke was so enthusiastic that they will actually be making and selling the case.

Blah, blah, blah!


a

We are talking the whole Maxillah, coming in beige or black, faux 5.25 inch external drive, a real DVD Drive, mounted sideways with reinforcing to support a monitor, etc.

I want this.  It makes no sense, but I want this:

Putting out a joke product on April Fools' Day can sometimes be a clever way to quietly gauge the reaction to a wild idea without having to really commit to it.

Nerdish purveyor ThinkGeek did this a few times with the 8-bit tie and the Tauntaun sleeping bag. Pokemon Go crystallized in some ways from a Google Maps joke. And just recently, PC case-maker SilverStone has decided that so many people were into its beige-tastic FLP01 case idea, tossed onto X (formerly Twitter) late on March 31 Tokyo time, that it will now release it in early 2025 in Japan for the USD equivalent of $130.

As shown off at SilverStone's Expo 2024 show in Akihbara last weekend (and spotted on Tom's Hardware), the FLP-01 is a combination of simulacrum and serious, with heavy NEC PC-9800 homage. It has fake 5.25-inch floppy blanks, but they cover real optical disc drive and button/port modules. At SilverStone's Japan Expo, the firm packed a GeForce RTX 4060 Ti, Intel Core Ultra 7 256K CPU, and full-size ATX motherboard and PSU. There are, of course, power and disk activity LEDs on the front. As displayed, SilverStone's demo unit had three intake fans and plenty of room for whatever else you could pack in here.

The whole thing looks like a modern case flipped on its side, so your modern system-building and wire-routing skills won't go to waste. It's 17.32×14.25 inches and 6.7 inches tall in its (literal) desktop configuration, and the case is reinforced enough that you can use it as a monitor stand.

 Yeah, I want the 8 bit tie and the Tauntaun sleeping bag too.

 

Linkage

• 'Doomsday' Antarctic glacier melting faster than expected, fueling calls for geoengineering (Phys.org) Calls for geoengineering is an indicator for unseriousness and fraud.
• Small cuts to beef production in wealthier nations could remove years of carbon emissions, study shows  (Agriculture Dive) The nbumber is not chump change, it's13%.
• How the Fed helped Doom the Democrats (The Bonddad Blog) The rate hikes were historically extreme.
• Does All Semiconductor Manufacturing Depend on Spruce Pine Quartz? (Construction Physics) Short answer, "No, it might raise the cost of a chip by a few percent though."
• We May Not Get Our Recession until the AI Spending Bubble Implodes (Wolf Street) An economy dependent on naked fraud.  Lovely.
• Punctuation is dead because the iPhone keyboard killed it (Android Authority) The short version is that you have to toggle the keyboard to punctuate, unlike on more sane keyboards, which have the period and comma on the home screen.
• What Is ‘Skiplagging?’ Meet the Man Unearthing Cheap Travel Hacks. (The New York Times) Skip lagging is where you want to get location A, but a direct flight is expensive, so you book a flight to B transferring at A at a lower price, and get off at A. Airlines hate this.
• Lost In The Future (Where's Your Ed At?) Money quote, "We — users of products — are at war with the products we’re using and the people that make them. And right now, we’re losing. "
• Gladiator knife handle found in Tyne ‘reflects spread of Roman celebrity culture  (The Guardian) Roman sports memorabilia.
• Archaeologists Use Spy Satellite Images to Spot Location of Famous Ancient Battle  (Gizmodo) Interesting application of remote imaging.
• America PAC Petition Signers Sue Elon Musk (Comic Sands) Interesting conundrum for the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™.  Does he admit defrauding the people who gave him his names and addresses, or does he admit buying voter registrations?  (Short answer, neither, he ties this up in court for years)

Eric Schmidt's, tech bro talk, saying the quiet part out loud:

Headline of the Day

The Vatican Launched an Anime Mascot and Web Users Wasted No Time in Porn-ifying It

—Gizmodo

Have they learned nothing from Boaty McBoatface?

Maybe I'm being to harsh though.

Who could turn this into pr0n?

Clearly, Cash is Over

Which is why the Finnish central bank has begun to warn its citizens to keep cash on hand.

Say what you will about funny colored pieces of paper, but it just works, all the time: 

In October, 2022, Päivi Heikkinen, the Head of the Payment Systems Department and Chief Cashier at the Bank of Finland, warned that Finland’s payments system could go down for weeks, and urged households to keep enough cash to last them for up to 72 hours in case of payment system disruptions. The irony, as we pointed out at the time, is that Finland, like its Scandinavian peers, is among the world’s most cashless economies, and its central bank, like its counterparts in Norway and Sweden, played more than a bit-part role in making that possible:

According to the Bank of Finland, [Finland] is on track to become completely cashless by 2030. A survey conducted last year by the central bank found that only 7% of people use cash when making purchases. Ninety percent of the survey’s respondents said they pay for their groceries with a card or mobile payment app.

However, Heikkinen says that now is not a good time to give up cash completely, given the rising risk of attacks against Finnish infrastructure, including its payments system:

“More payment methods bring resilience. If a single payment method sometimes does not work, then we have other payment methods at our disposal. Cash still plays a very important role here.”

It seems that more and more central banks in Europe are rediscovering one of the beauties of cash: its resilience. It won’t fail in a power cut or seize up during a cyber attack (although, of course, ATMs might). As Brett Scott, author of Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto and the War for our Wallets, notes , any society that runs purely on digital platforms operated by large financial institutions “is going to have major resiliency problems.” 

Indeed.

There is Never a Single Reason

But Kamala Harris' decision to make Elizabeth Cheney's endorsement of her central to the campaign was an own goal of epic proportions.

It was pandering to a section of the electorate, never-Trumpers, who were already going to vote Harris and whose numbers were vanishingly small.

Additionally, it served to demoralize potential supporters.

Kamala Harris made her first campaign appearance with Liz Cheney in Ripon, Wisconsin, the birthplace of the Republican Party, one month and two days before the 2024 election. The point of the visit was to signal to conservatives that they could split with Donald Trump’s Republican Party over their concerns about the former president’s election denialism, authoritarian rhetoric, and embrace of global strongmen. Republicans could, Cheney argued, cast a “Country Over Party” vote for the Democratic presidential nominee—just like the former chair of the House Republican Conference, who broke with Trump over his refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election, planned to do.

The media loved the story. Lavish attention was paid to the event. Cable channels went live. Ponderous essays were written in the great newspapers of the nation about the prospect that Harris would attract enough Republican votes to upend Trump’s bid for a second term.

Unfortunately, while many Democratic tacticians were enthusiastic about Cheney’s jumping on board as a Harris backer, Republican voters couldn’t have cared less. The Cheney strategy was an abject failure that added few if any votes to the Democratic total, alienated voters who have no taste for the former GOP representative’s neocon extremism, and stole precious time from an agonizingly short campaign schedule.

I'm sure that Harris' advisers thought that this was a good idea, but these advisors are all a product of the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) political consultancy community, and they thought that it was a good idea because running on nothing makes said political consultants money. 

We are Unbelievably Screwed

The second largest reservoir in the United States, Lake Powell is in danger of having its level fall so low that the flow of the Colorado river will simply stop.

There would still be a lake over 100 miles long behind the dam, but the level of the water would be below the lowest outlet from the dam, so even that meager supply would simply sit and evaporate.

The consequences would be catastrophic, leading to immediate mass water shortages for 10s of millions of people:

………

Back then, the idea of draining Lake Powell was fringe, attractive to anti-government extremists and radical environmentalists. Those who advocated a legal decommissioning of the Glen Canyon Dam, including supporters of the Glen Canyon Institute in Salt Lake City, were often laughed out of the room.

In those years, the dam was working as intended. Lake Powell was nearly full in the late ‘90s. Hydropower production was going full tilt, and millions of people were visiting the reservoir annually to fish, houseboat, and water ski.

But since the year 2000, Lake Powell has been in decline. Climate change has reduced runoff throughout the Colorado River Basin by around 20% compared to the previous century. In 2022, the reservoir — the second-largest in the country after Lake Mead — was less than a quarter full.

Nearly every boat ramp on Lake Powell was unusable last spring, and there was barely enough water to sustain hydroelectric generation. One more bad snow year would have pushed the Colorado River system to the brink of collapse, dropping the reservoir’s surface toward the lowest outlets on the Glen Canyon Dam–a point known as “dead pool.”

That’s because there is a significant design flaw in the dam: There is no drain at the bottom. Billions of gallons of water would be trapped in the dead-pool reservoir with no easy way to release them into the Grand Canyon.

………

At dead pool, the 27 million people who rely on Colorado River water downstream from the dam would likely be forced to reduce water use quickly and involuntarily.

But Lake Powell would still stretch 100 miles into Glen Canyon at dead pool.

At some point in the not too distant future, we will discover that large swaths of the United States, and the rest of the world, will no longer be able to accommodate their current population densities. 

There may be some technical fixes out there, but I do not see them as being sufficient support the viability Lake Powell, or for that matter, the entire Colorado river basin.

BTW, you can find an academic article discussing this here.

I'm Assuming that Hochul is Running a Political Ploy

You may recall that New York Governor Kathy Hochul killed New York City's congestion pricing plan.

My guess is that much like all of her policy decisions, this was an an attempt to suck up to big donors.

Well now, the Governor has reversed herself and will support the plan.

New York will revive its once-abandoned plan for the nation’s first congestion-pricing program, but at a reduced rate of a $9 toll for most vehicles to enter Midtown and Lower Manhattan, according to five people familiar with the matter.

Gov. Kathy Hochul intends to announce the state’s revised proposal on Thursday, lowering the initial $15 charge for cars to enter Manhattan’s core at peak hours.

The new plan would be fast-tracked for implementation. It would go before the Metropolitan Transportation Authority board for approval next week, and would most likely take effect before President-elect Donald J. Trump takes office in January — a time frame that aims to pre-empt Mr. Trump’s vows to kill the program.

My guess is that she has not actually reversed herself, but that she is hoping that she can score political points for supporting the plan while allowing Donald Trump to kill it.

State officials believe that they will not need to repeat the lengthy environmental review process because the previous review accounted for a range of tolls from $9 to $23. The state and city must sign an agreement with transportation officials in the Biden administration, who have been supportive of the plan.

The last-minute effort to save the tolling plan comes as Ms. Hochul has faced growing pressure from transit advocates and state lawmakers to secure funding for the transit system. She also faces legal challenges from supporters of congestion pricing.

Ms. Hochul shocked New Yorkers in June when she announced she would pause the toll “indefinitely” just weeks before it was slated to go into effect. She has consistently insisted that she held up the plan because she believed that a $15 toll was too high, but many speculated that she also believed the toll could hurt Democrats in the November election.

Bullsh%$.  She wanted to pander to suburban commuters and f%$# the poors.

All Trump has to do is to rescind approval, something he has already promised that he will do, and it's dead.

Do not mistake a fraud for a policy change.

Support Your Local Police

It turns out that hundreds of police officers have sexually abused minors, and generally there is no jail time, and often they keep their jobs, though in the case of Gauley Bridge, West Virginia police chief Larry Clay, we saw a conviction and a a loss of his badge.  The sentencing has been repeatedly delayed, but he continues to be held in the county jail)

They served in police departments big and small. They were new recruits and seasoned veterans, patrol officers and chiefs of police. They understood the power of their guns and badges. In many cases, they used that very power to find and silence their victims.

A Washington Post investigation has found that over the past two decades, hundreds of law enforcement officers in the United States have sexually abused children while officials at every level of the criminal justice system have failed to protect kids, punish abusers and prevent additional crimes.

Police and sheriff’s departments have enabled predators by botching background checks, ignoring red flags and mishandling investigations. Accused cops have used their knowledge of the legal system to stall cases, get charges lowered or evade convictions. Prosecutors have given generous plea deals to officers who admitted to raping and groping minors. Judges have allowed many convicted officers to avoid prison time.

………

Cases like these are not unique. The Post identified at least 1,800 state and local law enforcement officers who were charged with crimes involving child sexual abuse from 2005 through 2022.

The Post also conducted an exclusive analysis of the nation’s most comprehensive database of police arrests.

The Post found that 1 in 10 of those officers were charged with a crime involving child sexual abuse.

………

The consequences: Nearly 40 percent of convicted officers avoided prison sentences. 

Unless and until police misconduct is handled at least as aggressively as it is with the general populace, nothing will change.

I would argue that this should be handled more severely, because officers are acting with the real or implied force of the state behind them, and they know the law.  (Kind of a requirement for the job)

You will not train your way out of this, but you might jail your way out of it.

Aristophanes Wrote This Play 2435 Years Ago

There is something called the 4B movement, and there are people considering it in the United States.

The short version is that this is a movement, which originated in the Republic of Korea, where women are swearing off men.

This is not an attempt to create a change in policy, as the sex strike for peace in Aristophanes comedy Lysistrata was in 411 B.C.E., rather it is an attempt by women to assert personal autonomy in a patriarchal society.

The 4 "B"s are no marriage to men, no child bearing, no dating men, and  no sex with men. (The "B"s are in the Korean terms for this.

I don't see it going anywhere in the United States, but it's interesting:

In the week since Trump’s election victory, between the numbness and overall dread, maybe you’ve heard or read the phrase “4B movement” and thought, Movement of any kind feels difficult at the moment. Hey, no judgment, that was many of us last week. But now that some of the immediate panic has settled into a more concrete and permanent apprehension, you hopefully have the capacity to learn more about the phrase and why it’s being thrown around so much. 

First of all, you wouldn’t be alone in your curiosity. Searches for the “4b movement,” which originated in South Korea in 2016, spiked nearly 100% in the last seven days. Social media is ablaze with users explaining it, decrying it, or suggesting the U.S. get on board with it. “Women are refusing to have kids until they’re treated equally,” Drew Afualo explained on Rainn Wilson’s podcast. That is certainly part of the movement. In general, the nature of online discourse and the reactionary buzz following Trump’s re-election has simplified the 4B movement into merely being a sex strike—which in turn has allowed it to become more of a punchline. But I think the question to grapple with isn’t how effective a U.S. 4B movement would or wouldn’t be, but why some women feel it’s a worthwhile endeavor at all.

But let me back up…The 4B movement is a South Korean feminist movement that centers around four main tenets: “Bihon” (no heterosexual marriage), “Bichulsan” (no childbirth), “Biyeonae” (no dating), and “Bisekseu” (no heterosexual sexual relationships). It began to emerge around 2018 when gender tensions reached a fever pitch after years of a growing cultural demonization of feminism. In 2014, Ilbe, an online alt-right, misogynistic community began to grow more and more popular among young men. In 2016, a young woman was murdered in a public bathroom in Seoul by a young man who was angry that women kept ignoring him. (Despite his alarming reasoning, police did not label the murder a hate crime.) That same year, triggered by the low birth rate, the government released a “National Birth Map,” which showed where all the women of reproductive age lived. (Women, understandably, were furious to be labeled like livestock.)  In 2018, another movement emerged called “escape the corset,” which rejected the laborious beauty efforts expected of Korean women. 

 ………

But don’t interpret the aforementioned spike in interest as support. Search the phrase on TikTok and you’ll have to dig through thousands of videos of American women mocking the movement, calling it a disgrace, and declaring that they won’t be shaving their heads anytime soon, before you’ll get to anyone saying they’re opting into it. (Again, even in South Korea, 4B is considered fringe.) 

I don't think that this will go anywhere, not even in Korea, where misogyny is an even more entrenched political force than it is in the United States, but this is interesting.

Not This Sh%$ Again

(I am seriously Jonesing for "Say F%$# January) 

When talking about political has-beens, two names immediately come to mind, James Carville and David Axelrod.

Neither of them have been worth listening to since their guy left office, but they refuse to shut the F%$# up.

Case in point, David Axelrod wants Rahm Emanuel to be the chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

No.  Just no.

The man is a bully, and he is incompetent.

The wave election of 2006 occurred in spite of his being head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.  He fought tooth and nail against Howard Dean's 50 state strategy, and dumped millions into candidates who stood for nothing and lost.

Charlie Pierce nails it:

Can we all just agree not to listen to the likes of James Carville and (especially) David Axelrod anymore? Two political railbirds who bet on talented long shots, won big, and decided they had Figured It All Out. Pursuing the metaphor to the present day, the two of them are now haunting the grandstand, looking for half-eaten hot dogs and hoping that someone will come by and recognize them. Someone like, say, The Hill:

“If they said, ‘Well, what should we do? Who should lead the party?’ I would take Ambassador Rahm Emanuel and I would bring him back from Japan, and I would appoint him chairman of the Democratic National Committee,” Axelrod said Tuesday on his podcast “Hacks on Tap.”

Hacked Tapped Out is more like it.

“He is the most skillful political kind of in-fighter in the Democratic Party....He’s been a member of Congress, he’s been White House chief of staff, he’s been the mayor of Chicago. Now, he’s been ambassador to Japan, and he ran, in 2005 and [2006], the campaign to take back the House when Democrats were trying to take back the House of Representatives,” Axelrod continued.

Man crushes are so unseemly in someone of Axelrod’s age.

Emanuel has been wrong on policy and wrong on politics throughout his entire career.

His virtues, such as they are, is that he is a corrupt asshole.

Someone whose only skill is failing upward does not deserve a 3rd chance.

The last thing we need is a bunch of Obama retreads running the Democratic Party.

Best Healthcare System in the World

No Surprises Billing Act.

To get around this, have them manually print off the form, cross off what you don't agree to, sign it and hand it back.

A reminder that you ARE NOT REQUIRED to waive your federal rights to receive care.

— Dr. Ashley | The Panicked Foodie (she/her) (@PanickedFoodie) November 13, 2024

Of Course They Did

It appears that healthcare providers are trying to deceive patients into signing a waiver of their rights under the No Surprises Billing Act. 

Why am I not surprised.

As is noted a bit lower in the thread, this waiver is almost certainly unlawful, as it does not provide the required information on the expected cost of said services.

This is why I am opposed to a single payer system and support instead a National Health System similar to what is in the UK.

The profit motive corrupts healthcare, and if all the government does is sign the checks and occasionally look for irregularities, then the profit driven rat-f%$#ery will continue.

The government does not need to merely control the payment for services, it needs to own those services.

I May Have Been Too Dismissive of Grok

As my regular reader(s) know, I have repeatedly dismissed the current LLM style artificial intelligence as little more than a glorified ELIZA program.

I also been dismissive of Elon Musk and his programs and his promises.

That being said, Grok, which is the unholy juxtaposition would seem to me to rather likely to be worst in show among the AI clown car.

Or it was until it called out the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ as the worst purveyor of misinformation on Ecch (Twitter).

Sharper than a serpent's tooth, Elon:

Elon Musk might be in charge of the business of Grok, but the artificial intelligence has seemingly gone into business for itself, labeling Musk as one of the worst offenders when it comes to spreading misinformation online.

User Gary Koepnick asked the AI which person spreads the most information on Twitter/X—and the service did not hesitate in pointing a finger at its creator.

“Based on various analyses, social media sentiment, and reports, Elon Musk has been identified as one of the most significant spreaders of misinformation on X since he acquired the platform,” it wrote, later adding “Musk has made numerous posts that have been criticized for promoting or endorsing misinformation, especially related to political events, elections, health issues like COVID-19, and conspiracy theories. His endorsements or interactions with content from controversial figures or accounts with a history of spreading misinformation have also contributed to this perception.”

………

The smackdown from his own AI system, ironically, came soon after Musk touted the system to his followers in a tweet reading “Use Grok for answers that are based on up-to-date info!”

Grok itself, it’s worth noting, was accused of spreading misinformation about state ballots in August, prompting the company to make changes to its algorithm.

There is an old Japanese proverb, "バカにつける薬はない", There is no medicine for stupidity.

Seems apt here.

Faces, Meet Leopards

'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

This Tweet is Truly Eternal

So, Trump wins the elections, and the stock market soars, because  ……… The Aristocrats?

Now that Donald is announcing his cabinet, not so much.

Trump has very explicitly stated that the his cabinet would be more slavishly loyal and more corrupt than the last one, which included Bob Barr, Steve Bannon, and Stephen Miller.

The fact that his currently announced choices resemble the extras in the Will Smith version of I am Legend, should come as no surprise:

Donald Trump’s controversial picks for his upcoming Cabinet have rattled right past the American public and on to damaging Wall Street.

In the wake of Trump’s decision to tap vaccine foe Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run the Department of Health and Human Services, stocks linked to some of the biggest pharmaceutical companies—including Moderna, Pfizer, and Novavax—plummeted to some of their lowest points of the year.

Gee one might think that leopards ate their faces.

Headline of the Day

The Democrats Committed Suicide This Year

—James K. Galbraith

Galbraith is right.

He notes Trump's victory netted him as many votes as he got in 2020, while Kamala Harris got 10 million fewer votes than Biden.

It's well worth the read, but I want to note two quotes.  The first is is, "Those who went to the polls appear to have voted as they did last time. There are always a few “swing voters,” but there is a reason reporters seek them out in the way that anthropologists once sought out cannibals: they are rare."

The second is more important to my mind, and somewhat longer:

The Democratic leadership engineered this situation and must therefore desire it. Win or lose, it remains in control of a vast shadow apparatus: consultants, pollsters, lobbyists, fundraisers, key positions on Capitol Hill. Any concessions to new forces within the party would undermine this control, whereas losses to Republicans do not. The Democratic leadership would far rather lose an election or two – or even become a permanent minority party – than open the party to people it cannot control.

The 2024 election was, therefore, a suicide. The Democratic leadership was, at best, indifferent to the erosion of voting access, negligent in retaining 2020’s new voters, and proactive in ensuring the abstention of what little remains of its “left” wing. It tried to cover this up, as usual, with celebrity endorsements and identity politics. As usual, it did not work. But the party’s mandarins and their apparatchiks will be around next time to try again. 

This is a description of what I call the Iron Law of Institutions. which is, as I have noted many times, "The people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself. Thus, they would rather the institution "fail" while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to "succeed" if that requires them to lose power within the institution." (Not my idea or term, this term was coined by Jon Schwarz)

Termites in Your Cabinet

And by "You" I mean Donald Trump, and by "Cabinet", I mean the White House Cabinet, and by "Termites " I mean the worm that ate Robvert F. Kennedy Jr.s brain.

Trump has announced that RFK, Jr. is his choice to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

President-elect Donald Trump on Thursday announced that he has selected Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run the Department of Health and Human Services, the sprawling agency responsible for administering millions of Americans’ health insurance, approving drugs and medical supplies, regulating food and responding to infectious-disease outbreaks. Kennedy, a vaccine skeptic, is the latest Trump selection for his Cabinet who could face a contentious Senate confirmation. While speaking Thursday evening at the America First Policy Institute gala at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, the president-elect revealed he picked North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum to lead the Interior Department — a selection he said would be made official on Friday. 

In case you have not heard of Governor Burgum, he's a wholly owned subsidiary of big oil.

Trump has also appointed Todd Blanche and Emil Bove for deputy attorney general and principal associate deputy attorney general respectively.

Their qualifications?  They were a part of the clown show that Trump's criminal defense team.

Also D. John Sauer is his pick for solicitor general.  Sauer was the rat-f%$# who successfully argued before the corrupt Supreme Court that Donald Trump should be immune from everything.

I need to get a current passport.

F%$#

It's Official. the Republicans have held on to their majority in the House of Representatives.

The next few years are going to suck like 1000 Hoovers all switched on at once.

This Made Me Smile

The Onion, America's Finest News Source, has bought Alex Jones’s Infowars at bankruptcy auction.

No, this is not another parody from the satirical site, but Infowars shortly will be another parody form the satirical news site:

The Onion, a satirical publication that skewers newsmakers and current events, said on Thursday that it had won a bankruptcy auction to acquire Infowars, a website founded and operated by the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. But in a twist all too typical of six years of often-chaotic litigation, within hours the bankruptcy judge temporarily halted the deal.

The Onion said its bid was sanctioned by the families of the victims of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, who in 2022 won a $1.4 billion defamation lawsuit against Mr. Jones and his company, Free Speech Systems. The publication plans to reintroduce Infowars in January as a parody of itself, mocking “weird internet personalities” like Mr. Jones who traffic in misinformation and health supplements, Ben Collins, the chief executive of The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, said in an interview.

A lawyer for the Onion said the deal was secure. But during an emergency hearing hours after a triumphant announcement, Judge Christopher Lopez of U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Houston put a hold on the sale until a hearing early next week.

It seems to me that the alleged irregularities were not on the part of The ONion, but rather on the only other bidder, which appeared to be a shell company for Alex Jones. \

Judge Lopez cited concerns about a lack of transparency in the secret bidding process and a need to clarify which assets the winners are buying. One of the assets in dispute is Mr. Jones’s account on X.

The auction drew only two bidders. Walter J. Cicack, a Houston lawyer representing First United American Companies, a business associated with an online supplement store that bears Mr. Jones’s name, bid $3.5 million in cash for Infowars’ website, related websites and Infowars’ lucrative supplements business. In the Houston hearing, Mr. Cicack said the court-appointed trustee who managed the sale had informed him that he was the “backup bidder” and had lost. But he was not given an opportunity to increase his bid and was not told the amount of the winning bid, he said.

Yeah, just a supplement company.  It's a straw man for Jones.

Also, this bit is delicious:

The Onion group did not release the terms of the sale, but in the hearing it emerged that it had offered less in cash than First United. It won by including a “credit bid,” a pledge by Sandy Hook families who had sued Mr. Jones in Connecticut to forgo for now collecting on a portion of the damages due them.

The Sandy Hook families are amused by this development, which won't make up for their loss, but they are owed every pfennig of Schadenfreude that can be mad available to them.

Best Healthcare System in the World

What a surprise, for-profit Medicare Advantage plans are aggressively pushing seniors out of those plans, leaving them to go to traditional Medicare, boosting their profits and increasing the costs to taxpayer and to the Medicare trust fund.

It's almost like Medicare Advantage plans are s tactic to destroy Medicare and encourage looting.

Oh ……… Right ……… That was the plan all along.

Patricia Greene had spent a month recovering from a devastating stroke when her Medicare Advantage insurer, a unit of UnitedHealth Group, decided to stop paying for her nursing home.

The 85-year-old was so weak and fragile, her son said, that she couldn’t even get herself out of bed. Her family felt she wasn’t ready to leave the facility in New York City’s Queens borough.

So she dropped her UnitedHealth coverage and enrolled in the traditional version of Medicare run directly by the federal government.

That decision saved UnitedHealth tens of thousands of dollars in the months that followed, billing records show, and shifted onto taxpayers the cost of later hospital and nursing home care in what turned out to be the final months of her life. 

A Wall Street Journal analysis of Medicare data found a pattern of Medicare Advantage’s sickest patients dropping their privately run coverage just as their health needs soared. Many, like Greene, made the switch after running into problems getting their care covered. 

………

Medicare Advantage insurers collectively avoided $10 billion in medical costs incurred by the dropouts during that period, the analysis found. If those beneficiaries had stayed in their plans, the government would have paid the insurers about $3.5 billion in premiums, meaning the companies netted more than $6 billion in savings during that period. 

………

Medicare Advantage grew out of the idea that the private sector could make the sprawling Medicare program more economical, and private insurers now oversee benefits for more than half of Medicare recipients.

The insurers use some of the same money-saving tactics they use with their non-Medicare customers, such as requiring referrals from primary-care doctors or approvals from insurers for many services, and including only certain hospitals and doctors in their networks. In 2022, Medicare Advantage insurers denied 3.4 million requests for services, according to an analysis by the health-policy nonprofit KFF.

This is really simple.  If you bring in private insurance, you get private insurance rat-f%$#ery.

It's Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So, initial unemployment claims claims dropped to the lowest level in 6 months. The 4-week moving average and continuing claims fell as well.

Meanwhile, the consumer price index is flat, making the path to the Federal Reserve's is less certain, and the producer price index rose, with core producer prices rising higher still.

From an economic standpoint, I m not sure what it all means, but from a monetary and regulatory perspective, I would expect to see the Fed pause, or at least slow its reductions in interest rates.

Let It Never Be Said That I Was Charitable to the Dallas Cowboys Football Team

I don't follow football much anymore.  Dan Snyder's perfidy put me off of the Washington franchise, and the increase in reports of brain injury for the players put me off the sport more generally.

That being said, I hate the Dallas Cowboys franchis, it's a holdover from my days as a Washington fan.

I don't generally follow Dallas' season, but when I heard that in addition to having a complete turd of a season, that they F%$#ed up honoring their first coach, Tom LaUndry at their most recent game, I feel an urge to do a happy dance:

The Cowboys made a mistake when honoring former head coach Tom Landry on Sunday.

In the first quarter, Dallas recognized Landry’s military service during a video montage, but they spelled his name wrong on the AT&T Stadium jumbotron. His name appeared as “Tom Laundry” on the big board.

On the next play, Cowboys quarterback Cooper Rush fumbled the snap, and it was recovered by Eagles defensive tackle Milton Williams at Dallas’ 17. Four plays later, Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts rushed for a 1-yard touchdown.

I am amused.

You Knew That This Was Coming

Insurance companies are now using genetic profiles in order to refuse to cover people.

Sending in that swab to 23 & Me does not seem like such a bright idea now, does it? 

Best healthcare system in the world, huh?

The news came four years ago, at the end of a casual phone call. Bill’s family had always thought it was a freak coincidence that his father and grandfather both had ALS. But at the end of a catch-up, Bill’s brother revealed that he had a diagnosis too. The familial trend, it turned out, was linked to a genetic mutation. That meant Bill might also be at risk for the disease.

An ALS specialist ordered Bill a DNA test. While he waited for results, he applied for long-term-care insurance. If he ever developed ALS, Bill told me, he wanted to ensure that the care he would need as his nerve cells died and muscles atrophied wouldn’t strain the family finances. When Bill found out he had the mutation, he shared the news with his insurance agent, who dealt him another blow: “I don’t expect you to be approved,” he remembers her saying.

Bill doesn’t have ALS. He’s a healthy 60-year-old man who spends his weekends building his dream home by hand. A recent study of mutations like his suggests that his genetics increase his chances of developing ALS by about 25 percent, on average. Most ALS cases aren’t genetic at all. And yet, Bill felt like he was being treated as if he was already sick. (Bill asked to be identified by his first name only, because he hasn’t disclosed his situation to his employer and worried about facing blowback at work too.)

What happened to Bill, and to dozens of other people whose experiences have been documented by disease advocates and on social media, is perfectly legal. Gaps in the United States’ genetic-nondiscrimination law mean that life, long-term-care, and disability insurers can obligate their customers to disclose genetic risk factors for disease and deny them coverage (or hike prices) based on the resulting information. It doesn’t matter whether those customers found out about their mutations from a doctor-ordered test or a 23andMe kit.

Don't get genetic testing, or if you do, do it under an assumed name.

We really need to destroy private health insurance if we hope to save public health in the United States.

Everything That Is Wrong with the Democratic Party Establishment (There Is No Democratic Party Establishment) in One News Story

Kamala Harris' former PR flack is suggesting that Joe Biden resign a couple of days before his term ends so that Kamala can be the first Black Woman President.

Seriously, in a world of useless gestures that cost a f%$# ton of money, Harris spent a billion dollars on the campaign, this reaches new levels of stupidity:

Jamal Simmons, a former aide to Vice President Harris, called for President Biden to resign so that the vice president can have his role for a short amount of time.

“Joe Biden’s been a phenomenal president, he’s lived up to so many of the promises he’s made. There’s one promise left that he could fulfill, being a transitional figure,” Simmons said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on a panel featuring anchor Dana Bash, in a clip highlighted by Mediaite.

“He could resign the presidency in the next 30 days, make Kamala Harris president of the United States,” he continued, drawing shocked reactions from others.

I get that he has a sad because of the elections results.  Hell, I has a sad because of the election results, and I never liked Kamala Harris, but an empty gesture which shows a profound lack of interest in ……… the public? ……… The votors? ……… People who are not delusional narcissists.

I get the feeling, and were it said at a cocktail party, it ……… OK, it would still be stupid, awful, and deplorable, but not AS stupid, awful, and deplorable.

The whole Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) needs to be sent to Butte, Montana to staff Casagranda's Steakhouse.

Have you Heard about the new Matt Gaetz Biopic

The tentative title is Close Encounters with the 3rd Grade.

If you have been living in a cave, you may not know that Donald Trump has picked Florida Congressman, and noted ephebophiliac, Matt Gaetz, has been chosen by Donald Trump as his nominee for Attorney General. 

Gaetz announced his immediate retirement from Congress, probably because he get out before the House Ethics Committee dropped its report on allegation of sex with underage girls and human trafficking.

🚨 🚨BREAKING NEWS FROM @PunchbowlNews :

Rep. Matt Gaetz's (R-Fla.) resignation from Congress came two days before the House Ethics Committee was set to vote on releasing a “highly damaging” report outlining its investigation into the Republican, according to multiple sources…

— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) November 14, 2024

Gates does seem to be the very modern model of a modern Republican hypocrite.  (Someone please Gilbert and Sullivan filk this)

Pity the poor writers at The Onion.  This is literally beyond parody.

Quote of the Day

The Consultants Don’t Care. They Made a Bundle. They Do All This Advertising — Social Media, Direct Mail, and TV Spots. They Get Kickbacks on the Ads That They Place.

—James Zogby in a Rolling Stone interview

He's right.

The consultant's perfect candidate is someone rich and stupid who spends like a drunken sailor, because it makes them money.

At Least They Know Their Priorities

After many years of disinvestment and overspending on stock buybacks, chip maker Intel is engaging in massive cutbacks and laying off 15% of their workforce, but those who remain will still get their free coffee.

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

Struggling chip giant Intel has rescinded a cost-cutting plan to abolish free coffee and tea for its staff.

Intel is on an spending-slashing crusade at the moment, with a plan to bin about 15,000 staff to help right its financials. Just last month, it laid off 2,000 staff (1,300 of them from its Hillsboro, Oregon site) and announced big cuts in staff perks earlier in the year.

Among the cost-cutting measures, the much-cherished sabbatical that Intel staffers could get after four years has now been eliminated, and while staff will still get one every seven years, its duration has been halved to just a month off, The Oregonian reports.

Stock rewards have been reduced, there are no more free personal trainers at the gym for staff, there's no more fresh fruit in the office (unless you bring it yourself), the Intel air shuttle flying between Oregon, California, and Arizona has been shuttered, and the x86 titan said it would no longer have free tea and coffee in the office.

“Until we get into a better financial health position, we need to be suspending those,” Intel's chief people officer Christy Pambianchi told staff at the start of this week, adding that the chipmaker was spending about $100 million annually on free and discounted food and beverages. But Intel has now rescinded the ban on free tea and coffee in the office, since it seems that was a step too far.

First, what the f%$# is this "Chief People Officer" bullsh%$?

Ms.Pambianchi is head HR you blithering idiots.

You know, maybe if you spent more time designing chips and chip technology, and less time stroking yourselves with bogus job titles, you wouldn't be facing down an oncoming train.

Also, if a f%$#ing Keurig machine and some pods will break you, you no longer have the resources to compete in that capital intensive business.

Maybe management should have considered spending $152 billion in stock buybacks over the past 35 years and paying its CEO $179 million.  (Mostly in stock options, which were made valuable because of those stock options)

Get your sh%$ together, and stop f%$#ing calling your f%$#ing HR executives, "People Officers."

It makes you look like complete tools.

Headline of the Day

FTX Sues Binance for $1.76b in Battle of Crypto Exchanges Founded by Convicts

—Ars Technica

If this does not make absolutely clear Crypto is a scam, and always has been, you have not been paying attention.

The bankruptcy estate of collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX has sued the company's former rival Binance in an attempt to recover $1.76 billion or more. The lawsuit seeks "at least $1.76 billion that was fraudulently transferred to Binance and its executives at the FTX creditors' expense, as well as compensatory and punitive damages to be determined at trial."

The complaint filed yesterday in US Bankruptcy Court in Delaware names Binance and co-founder and former CEO Changpeng Zhao among the defendants. FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried sold 20 percent of his crypto exchange to Binance in November 2019, but Binance exited that investment in 2021, the lawsuit said.

"As Zhao would later remark, he decided to exit his position in FTX because of personal grievances he had against Bankman-Fried," the lawsuit said. "In July 2021, the parties negotiated a deal whereby FTX bought back Binance's and its executives' entire stakes in both FTX Trading and [parent company] WRS. Pursuant to that deal, FTX's Alameda Research division directly funded the share repurchase with a combination of FTT (FTX's exchange token), BNB (Binance's exchange token), and BUSD (Binance's dollar-pegged stablecoin). In the aggregate, those tokens had a fair market value of at least $1.76 billion."

Because FTX and Alameda were balance-sheet insolvent by early 2021, the $1.76 billion transfer "was a constructive fraudulent transfer based on a straightforward application" of bankruptcy law, and an intentional fraudulent transfer "because the transfer was made in furtherance of Bankman-Fried's scheme," the lawsuit said.

This is F%$#ed Up and Sh%$ (Still Cannot Make Planes Edition)

Elizabeth Lund, who was appointed Sr. VP of commercial aircraft safety at Boeing has announced her retirement.

She's only been in the position since just after the door blew out of the 737, so I think that she has concluded that she was in a no-win scenario:

Elizabeth Lund, senior vice president of quality at Boeing Commercial Airplanes and one of the company’s most prominent female executives, will retire next month, the company said Monday.

Lund, 59, was given the job of restoring Boeing’s quality control after a door-sized fuselage panel blew out in-flight on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 in January.

With Boeing in crisis ever since, she has been constantly under the spotlight, required to answer questions publicly from regulators and Congress about how the serious lapses happened, and explain the plan to fix the quality management system.

In an internal message to employees, Boeing Commercial Airplanes CEO Stephanie Pope wrote that Lund had planned to retire this year after more than 33 years at Boeing. Pope thanked Lund “for her strong leadership during a challenging year and her remarkable contributions to Boeing.”

………

A month after the Alaska Airlines fuselage blowout, Lund was tapped to lead the quality organization after the Federal Aviation Administration gave Boeing 90 days to come up with a plan to fix its management of product quality.

Interviewed by the National Transportation Safety Board in June, Lund admitted that a major push in 2019 to cut the number of Boeing quality inspectors by Ernesto Gonzalez-Beltran, then head of quality at Commercial Airplanes, had been a mistake.

“We are undoing much of what was done there,” Lund told the NTSB. “We have undone it, and I don’t think that we appropriately controlled and looked at all the risks when they did it.”

Later that month, Lund made a misstep at a press briefing when she commented on details about the Alaska Airlines incident that had not previously been publicly disclosed. She was rebuked by the NTSB for breaking strict disclosure rules about ongoing accident investigations.

As a result, Boeing was sanctioned and its access to the NTSB’s investigative information on the incident was withdrawn.

Out after 10 months means something, and it ain't good.

In related news, someone at Bloomberg (of all places) has run the numbers on the machinist deal, and observed that, given the insane cost of living in the Seattle area, the post strike wage increases amount to a barely living wage.

When Covid-19 brought the US economy to a standstill in the spring of 2020, America’s top executives called for a “national conversation” about the need for workers to return to work, warning of an “economic catastrophe” if they didn’t. I wrote at the time that a conversation we also needed to have was one about giving workers the security of a living wage. So, when I read the news that Boeing Co.’s machinists approved a new labor contract on Monday, locking in a hike of nearly 44% over four years, it was clear to me that the deal they struck was inevitable.

A shocking percentage of full-time workers don’t earn enough to raise a family, and that was true even before the recent spike in inflation made everything a lot more expensive. As much as two-thirds of full-time workers age 25 and older can’t cover the basic necessities for a family of four with one parent working, according to wage data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and living wage estimates from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

………

In the Seattle area, where Boeing produces most of its aircraft, a living wage is roughly $50 an hour for a family of four with one adult working, according to MIT’s living wage calculator, or about $104,000 a year based on a 40-hour work week. It’s probably no coincidence then that Boeing’s labor deal will raise the average machinist’s annual wage to $119,000 over four years. Assuming 3% annual inflation, a living wage for a family of four will be closer to $117,000 in four years, very nearly matching what Boeing’s workers agreed to.

………

Why should investors care? Because Boeing demonstrates that cutting corners with your workforce carries a cost. 

Now it seems as if Boeing merely delayed a reckoning, one that Covid may have accelerated but which would have eventually come. I can imagine Boeing executives saying a decade ago that they couldn’t afford to pay workers more, even though their own financial statements would have betrayed them. The truth is they couldn’t afford not to. How much of the company’s recent travails — the design flaws, the loose bolts, the sliding quality, the rumored coarsening culture — could have been avoided with greater care for its workforce? Most of it, I suspect.

Again, this article is remarkable because of the source, an asset manager and Bloomberg columnist.

Even he realizes that creating a disaffected workforce through relentless squeezing of the workers, costs the company big in the long run.

After all, they are the source of Boeing product and Boeing profits, not the overpaid and pampered executives, particularly in the case of Boeing.

 

Linkage

• Remembering The Who Bassist John Entwistle: 5 Isolated Tracks (Jam Base) All 5 videos are below, and "The Ox" is magnificent.
• Josseli Barnica Died in Texas After Waiting 40 Hours for Miscarriage Care (ProPublica) Killing women is a feature, not a bug.
• Why ghosts wear clothes or white sheets instead of appearing in the nude (The Conversation) A number of theories, the most compelling one to me is that the presense of clothing allows one to determine the social status of the apparition.
• Shroud of Turin 'does not show face of Jesus' – in fact he never touched it says study (Daily Star) The short version is geometry.  A shroud draped over the face shows distortions, much in the same way that a Mercator projection map does.
• Mass production of genetically selected humans: inside a Pennsylvania pronatalist candidate’s fantasy city-state | US elections 2024 (The Guardian) I wrote about her and her husband Malcolm and Simone Collins in a blog post titled, Parents of the Corn. She also believes that poor people's votes should count less, and there have been 2 visits from CPS and a house full of guns.
• Insiders Speak Out on Fontana PD’s Culture of White Supremacy (The Intercept) The La Habra, California police chief is a white supremacist insurrections (He got 11 years for his role), most of his career was with the Fontana, California PD, which is a profoundly racist organization.
• Demonize the Rich (How Things Work) "Fascists offer a fake enemy. We have to offer a real one."
• Handbook For The Politically Deceased (The Lever) Short version, the problem is the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment).
• Democrats Need to Clean House Before They Screw Up Again (The New Republic) TNR has improved a lot since Marty Peretz was removed.  Money quote, "That’s why anyone who had a leadership role in this campaign should never be allowed within throwing distance of a political operation ever again. Any prominent Democrat who didn’t fight tooth and nail to recognize voter concerns and fix the party’s trajectory should be primaried. And any person who sighs and chalks this loss up solely to racism and misogyny should be ignored."
• X Is a White-Supremacist Site (The Atlantic) What?  You mean the take over of Twitter by that Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ white supremacist resulted in white supremacy?  Hoocoodanode?

And on to the genius of John Entwhistle

Won't Get Fooled Again:


Baba O’Riley:


The Real Me:


Pinball Wizard:


Eminence Front: (Kind of dull at the beginning, then it takes off)
;

How About Some Good News?

It appears that hobbyist beekeepers are responsible for a net increase in colonies across the country.

These bees are better cared for, not trucked all over the country, and so are more resilient than their commercial counterparts, and this may prevent a shortage of pollinators:

There’s now a record number of honeybees humming in the U.S—and for many farmers, hobbyist beekeepers, and almond-milk lovers, the news is sweeter than honey.

Nearly a million bee colonies have been formed in the past five years, according to 2022 Census of Agriculture data from the USDA, boosting the total number of colonies to an all-time high of 3.8 million.

The record high has arrived after nearly 20 years of collapsing colonies, where bees died from exposure to poisonous pesticides, stress from cross-country transit to pollinate crops, invasive pests, and changes to habitat. While new colonies have formed, the threat of their collapse is still a very relevant danger.

One does wonder how anthropogenic climate change will factor into all of this.

 

Ecch (Tweet) of the Day

DNC Aiming To Reconnect With Working-Class Americans With New ‘Hamilton’-Inspired Lena Dunham Web Serieshttps://t.co/sK6mCVGjjy pic.twitter.com/btqVn95NeI

— The Onion (@TheOnion) November 10, 2024

In Onion, veritas.

In one one paragraph "America's Finest News Source" describes the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) perfectly.

Gee, Ya Think

So, the Daily Mail (Yeah, I know) interviewed  David Garrow, Barack Obama's Pulitzer prize winning biographer, and he criticizes the former President's campaigning for Harris as, "Tone-deaf preaching."

I do not understand why he is surprised by this.

Smug tone deaf preaching has kind of been Barack Obama's thing since he was (at least) a law student at Harvard:

Barack Obama and his wife Michelle have been slammed by his biographer for 'talking down' to voters in 'tone-deaf and clueless' preaching that harmed Kamala Harris' ill-fated presidential campaign.

The effect was so bad that – combined with Donald Trump's victory – it is likely to reduce the 44th president's political relevance to 'Bill Clinton levels', David Garrow said in an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com.

'People do not want to be talked down to, no matter who they are,' the 71-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner said.

………

Garrow said Tuesday's electoral rout has left Obama, 63, 'nervous' about the impact Trump could have on how he is seen by future generations.

'He has been and remains extremely concerned and nervous about his historical legacy,' he said.

Barack Obama's concern for his historical legacy has always been about him, and not about what he did, and did not do.

He betrayed his promises to labor, gave what amounted to amnesty to torturers, and he steadfastly protected the criminals behind the 2008 financial crisis from criminal prosecution.

At the same time, his administration allowed the victimization of homeowners through legally dubious means in order to, "Foam the runways," for the banksters.

F%$# Obama's narcissism, and %$# his legacy.

It's Bank Failure Friday!! (On Saturday)

I am not sure how I missed the failure of the The First National Bank of Lindsay (Oklahoma), the second bank failure of the year.  That was on October 18.  My bad.

What is interesting is that it appears that there was a strong possibility of fraud:

More than a year after a string of regional bank failures shook confidence in the industry, the abrupt failure of First National Bank of Lindsay, Oklahoma, on Friday is raising questions about whether the failure was due to idiosyncratic accounting errors at the bank or broader economic forces that could affect other institutions.
………

While state banking groups say the demise of the $107.8 million-asset firm was attributable to issues at the bank alone, the murky details of the First National CEO's departure and regulators' allegations of fraud are raising alarms for some bank industry experts.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency closed First National just before the weekend after the agency said it found "false and deceptive bank records" suggesting fraud and which ultimately drained the bank's capital reserves.

………

While the bank was relatively small for the industry, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. estimates the failure could cost the agency's Deposit Insurance Fund more than $43 million to wind down. In addition to the hefty cost, experts say discrepancies in the bank's accounting filings have left questions unanswered.

………

Another issue is the reported departure of the bank's then-CEO Danny Seibel just before the bank's failure. American Banker attempted to reach Seibel for comment but was unsuccessful.

Garvin County Sheriff Jim Mullett — whose district includes Lindsay — said Seibel left the bank weeks before the firm went bust, but that he had no criminal record or past run-ins with law enforcement.

Beverage said he heard about the CEO's departure following a federal regulatory exam.

"I first got word about two weeks ago [about the CEO departing] shortly after [what] I believe was the OCC exam," he said. "I haven't gotten the final word on who was the regulatory authority that was doing the exam."

Well, that seems completely above board and honest.

………

Byrne speculated that commercial real estate troubles could be playing a part. FDIC officials have said repeatedly the industry continues to face headwinds in the areas of credit, with rising non-current loan ratios, especially in consumer real estate.

Gee, ya think?

Also, in credit union land, Alliance Credit Union of Florida was shut down in Gainesville.  

No details in that case.

What does this all mean?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Cinderella has Covid

In a profoundly weird and depressing week, I had the opportunity to say something that was weird and amusing.

My eldest was going to go to a performance of the musical Into the Woods with friends, and we were going to give them a ride to the theater.

I just got a text from my kid, and tonight show has been canceled.

One of the actors has come down with coronavirus. 

Sharon (love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife) has not yet gotten the message, because they are in a conversation at the post service Oneg and their phone is off.

I tap her on the shoulder, and whisper in her ear, "Nat's play has been canceled, Cinderella has Covid."

She looks into my eyes, and we both collapse into hysterical giggling.

I do not know what the future is going to bring, but find someone you can laugh with.

Posted via mobile.

Ecch (Tweet) of the Day

Biden oversaw the single biggest removal of social benefits in American history, which resulted in the single biggest increase in poverty in American history. He called this "Bidenomics."

Then Kamala said she'd do nothing differently while campaigning in a $62,000 gold necklace. pic.twitter.com/uhEzzH5SGG

— Holding Dems Accountable (From the Left!) (@PushBidenLeft) November 8, 2024

This is indeed true.

While Biden did not have to power to keep all of these programs in place while facing a hostile, and honestly nihilist, Congress, he did have the power to keep many of them in place, simply by not declaring that the Covid emergency was over.

He declined to do so, because he and his people had decided that the appearance of normalcy was more important than the actual state of the ongoing pandemic and the condition of the people most effected by the pandemic.

To quote (not) Tallyrand, it was worse than a crime, it was a mistake.

They'll Preside Over the Ruins

Over at The Nation, Jeet Heer demands that we hold the corrupt and incompetent Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) accountable.

Nah Gah Nah Happen.

This is not just power, there are a whole class of people at the top of the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) whose living depends on the incompetence and corruption to continue, and, to quote the great Upton Sinclair, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

They would rather rule over a a Democratic Party in shambles then lose their power over the party.  

The title is the Boies Penrose quote.  When he was accused of destroying the Republican Party in Pennsylvanie to preserve his power within the party, he replied, "Yes, but I’ll preside over the ruins.."

While the presidential election wasn’t called until early Wednesday morning, by midnight the overwhelming evidence was that the Democrats were heading for a catastrophe on par with 2016. Donald Trump was already leading in all the battleground states; Republicans were poised to win the Senate, and the House of Representatives remains agonizingly close. There is a real danger of a Republican trifecta once the last votes are counted. It also appears that Donald Trump has won the popular vote—something he failed to do in his first two runs for the presidency.

Trump is now in a position to do enormous damage during his second term in office. We can expect that Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito will resign from the Supreme Court soo—and be replaced by much younger right-wing ideologues of the same ilk. This would ensure a right-wing stranglehold on the highest court in America for another generation. Trump will also be able to renew his tax cut of 2017, ensuring that trillions of dollars in wealth will be kept by billionaires rather than taxed for the benefit of the country. Trump will also be able to implement the extremist agenda of Project 2025, a plan to remake the American government along plutocratic lines.

Aside from Vladimir Putin, other alleged culprits for Trump’s victory included Bernie bros who allegedly sat out the election in spite, James Comey for releasing two letters about the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton, the media for overplaying the Clinton e-mail story and giving Trump too much airtime, and the general bigotry of the American public. While some of these factors did play a part in Trump’s victory, they functioned mainly as distractions from the inconvenient—to the party elite—truth that Clinton and the Democrats bore a much greater share of the responsibility. Clinton ran an uninspired campaign that focused too much on Trump’s personal foibles, while her party refused to take responsibility for neoliberal policies that had immiserated the American working class. Further, Clinton focused her message so heavily on winning over suburban college-educated voters who were normally Republican, and who in fact overwhelmingly stayed with Trump. This caused her to ignore the much larger number of voters who were working-class and non-college-educated.

………

The main fact of American politics in the post-Obama era is that an ever larger majority of Americans are angry at the status quo and open to anti-system politics. Trump won as the candidate of anti-system anger in 2016. In 2020, he suffered the liability of being the status quo even as Covid was ravaging the world. But by 2024 he was able to return again as the voice of change, bolstered by the fond memories many Americans have of the economy under his presidency—and of the temporary, but generous, expansion of the welfare state under Covid emergency measures.

I believe that this last paragraph is fundamentally wrong.  "Anti-system politics" were present, and in some election cycles ascendant (2010 "shellacking" anyone?), during the Obama administration, but Obama had the good fortune to be facing someone even more establishment than he was in 2012.

In fact, I would argue that "Anti-system politics" as a political force were in large part created by Barack Obama, when he bailed out corrupt and criminal bankers on the backs of ordinary people.

It's no wonder that a large number of voters want to burn everything to the ground.

Hell, I want to burn everything to the ground, nationalize health insurance, prosecute corrupt Supreme Court justices, throw anti-abortion terrorists in jail, and fire every single major political pundit in the country.

It's Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (on Friday)

The lede today is not the unemployment numbers, it's the Federal Reserve cut its benchmark rates by 250 basis points (¼%).

The cut was never in doubt, it was only the number:

The Federal Reserve lowered interest rates Thursday by a quarter of a percentage point as inflation continues to cool, but a cloudy economic outlook after Donald Trump was elected again could make the pace of future cuts uncertain.

The unanimous decision to cut rates for the second consecutive Fed meeting signals that officials are paying more attention to warnings of a softening job market. In September, the Fed reduced its benchmark interest rate for the first time in more than four years by a larger-than-usual half-percentage point.

………

The Fed’s benchmark rate now sits between 4.50 and 4.75 percent. Interest rate cuts trickle through the financial sector to make an array of consumer and business loans cheaper.

………

Analysts and investors in the futures market believe that yet another quarter-percentage-point cut is likely at the Fed’s final 2024 meeting in December, although the pace of additional cuts next year is uncertain.

Also in this story was a bit of palace intrigue:

………

Powell on Thursday also shut down questions about whether he would prematurely end his term running the central bank. He said that any attempted firing or demotion by the president — of himself or other Fed officials — was “not permitted under the law” and that he would not leave before the end of his term in May 2026 if Trump asked him to.

The issue has been front and center among Fed watchers because Trump repeatedly lashed out at Powell during his first term for not doing enough to stimulate the economy — and even asked his own advisers if he could fire his own Fed chief. Now, with Trump headed to another four years in the White House, some of his advisers have suggested that Powell should resign.

I don't know how any such conflict would pan out, but I'd like to see them both lose.

Unemployment claims


Labor Costs & Productivity Meanwhile, on to the unemployment numbers, where initial and continuing claims both rose by a bit over 1%, and the sado-monetarists are worrying about continuing evidence of pay increases for workers.

Never mind that productivity is rising faster than wages, which means that the effect is disinflationary, to keep the working man in his place.

The number of Americans filing new applications for unemployment benefits rose slightly last week, suggesting no material change in the labor market and reinforcing views that hurricanes and strikes had resulted in job growth almost stalling in October.

Though the labor market is easing, wage pressures are not showing a significant cooling, casting a shadow over the inflation and interest rate outlook. Unit labor costs increased at a solid clip in the third quarter, other data from the Labor Department showed on Thursday.

Economists said the strong rise in labor costs, which was accompanied by a sharp upward revision to the second-quarter data, was not compatible with inflation returning and staying at the Federal Reserve's 2% target. The U.S. central bank on Thursday cut interest rates by 25 basis points as expected, lowering its policy rate to the 4.50%-4.75% range.

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Initial claims for state unemployment benefits increased 3,000 to a seasonally adjusted 221,000 for the week ended Nov. 2, the Labor Department said. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast 221,000 claims for the latest week.
Unadjusted claims rose 10,827 to 212,274 last week, boosted by a 4,278 jump in filings in California. Applications rose by 3,563 in Michigan and shot up 1,927 in Ohio, more than offsetting notable drops in Florida and Georgia.

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Concerns about inflation were amplified by a separate report from the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics showing unit labor costs - the price of labor per single unit of output - increased at a solid 1.9% annualized rate in the July-September quarter after an upwardly revised 2.4% pace of expansion in the second quarter.

From a purely economic standpoint, I have no clue as to what is going.

More generally, we are about to get f%$#ed like a drunk sorority girl.