Water, Water Nowhere

As you've likely seen/heard, there's a monster Atmospheric River (of water) coming to the West Coast. Some even think it's enough to put a noticeable dent in the drought. May be not. While this is from a bit ago (although well after the last one was built), snowpack accounts for a huge chunk of the year-long water supply for California.

In California, the spring snowpack on average stores about 70% as much as the water stored in the State's reservoirs.

So, one supposes, that should global warming continue and that snow falls as rain, is that a good thing, or a bad thing? Likely, not so good.

That's a bunch of reservoirs (there are 1,300 or so). But, and there is always a but, how much of this River will just pass through to the Pacific in undammed rivers, spillways, and bare ground? Enquiring minds need to know. Well, now you do.

Climatologist Bill Patzert estimates that more than 80% of the region's rainfall ends up diverted from urban areas in Southern California into the Pacific. "All those trillions of gallons of rain, which sound so sweet, really end up in the ocean," he said.

If snow fell as rain, it would take about 910 more reservoirs (assuming there's a 'standard size', of course) to capture it all. Assuming that adequate geology even makes that feasible. Arizona could use it to run fabs. Truck it in; put all those whining semi-drivers to work.

Thought For The Day - 30 December 2022

So, if you thought the previous economic troubles due to supply chain disruption in China were a pain in the ass, get ready for the guillotine. As you should know by now, Chinese immunity isn't much better today than it was globally in January, 2020. Or, to put it bluntly, 'they ain't no there, there!' Welcome to the Second Covid Recession.

And, have a Happy New Year.

To Live and Die in LV

Here's a bit from the NYT write up of new moments in 2023 sports:

Simulations predict that drivers will reach speeds exceeding 210 miles per hour and experience G forces twice that of an astronaut launching into space.
-- Brandon Sneed

And, here's the Las Vegas circuit. As you see from the wiki page, the end of the Strip straight (drivers think they'll top out above 230 with DRS) runs straight into buildings. There's little runoff in street circuits, and Las Vegas is no different. Except by putting a 90 degree lefty at the end of 230.

Somebody's gonna die.

By The Numbers - part the twenty fifth

So, as I type Musk's 'informal poll' has 57.5% voting to get rid of the grifter, 42.5% voting to keep him. In political politics, that's a landslide. But, as the Real Pundits have noted: Musk still controls the company's stock and can, if he so chooses, install anyone as CEO. Another informal poll, conducted by one of the assumed heirs apparent (which listed said heirs to be voted on), had "Other" as the leader by a wide margin. Da ground get spongier.

Musk insists that Twitter's financial situation is dire, thus his firing of most (all?) of the guard-rail staff and myriad others. Don't need such when your goal is a mega-propaganda machine for the alt-right. Once an Afrikaner, always an Afrikaner.

What Musk never says... almost all of the debt burden was created by his 'takeover', with Other People's Money.

Debt before the takeover: $600,000,000 net. here.

With the acquisition... $13,000,000,000 in new debt. Annual service (as much as) ~$1,500,000,000, I guess nobody really knows fur shur. Dat's a lotta moolah just to be the Uber Goebbels. May be he could buy up a truckload of Batshit J. Moron's NFT Uberman cards? Might be worth a few billion bucks in a year or two?

Fusion Cuisine

By now you've heard/read about the net-positive fusion experiment at LL? Here's one take on the significance of this.

I tend toward a more diabolical view. There's only so much lithium available at reasonable effort, thus only so many battery powered automobiles. It's the energy density, portability, and rapid 'recharging' of petrol that undergirds its dominance in transport. Fusion generated electricity isn't going to change that no matter how abundant and cheap it turns out to be. The problem with electric transport is what most other places on the planet have chosen to adapt to: it requires a 'socialist' infrastructure of wires and vehicles that get their electrons from such. IOW, public trains, trams, and buses; which Freedom Loving Americans will never accept.

So, what will the future really (in my humble opinion) look like with fusion power plants replacing fossil and fission plants? Not much. Well, unless some neo-Einstein does invent Mr. Fusion. Doesn't seem likely.

On the other hand, Socialist Europe, with its existing (and expanding) electric transport infrastructure will stride boldly into the future. China too, by the way. Xi has fucked up Covid to a faretheewell, but basic civil engineering is simple by comparison.

There is a way to leverage fusion electricity, but still requires a radical change of view, especially from the MAGAmorons. You may have heard of electric induction? It's the basic physics that's implemented in stove tops which don't heat up. Well, at least not your body parts, but you have to dump your anodized aluminum pots and pans for ferric ones. Induction charging is how you can charge your smartphone without a wire, btw.

There are some small projects to use maglev to move trains. Even, it turns out, the USofA. And, it can be very efficient.

The real transformation could/would/will happen when someone gets the bright idea to embed induction cable in streets and highways; thus freeing the Freedom Loving American to drive where and when s/he wants without having to use up lithium and try to find a common recharging station in the middle of nowhere. Of course, those choosing to live in the middle of nowhere will be SOL. My heart bleeds for them.

So, what is the physics of this Nirvana? Well, it's been done for sixth graders! And, guess what? Those damned Socialists in Italy have already tested the idea!

The issue, as I see it at least, is whether to use this (nearly) limitless fusion electricity to directly power vehicles or to simply provide on-the-go charging. I'm willing to guess that the pavement wiring will support both vectors.

Dee Feat is in Dee Flation - part the forty sixth

As follow up to the last installment, more reporting on that hoard of moolah still hanging around in consumer's hands:

[M]any households are still in solid financial shape. They amassed $2.3 trillion in extra savings during the pandemic thanks to months stuck at home and government stimulus, and still had about $1.7 trillion of that by mid-2022, based on Fed research.

Going to take some more time to burn off those Bongo Bucks. The basic issue is: The Fed (pretty much irregardless which party runs the Administration) is always on the side of Big Bidnezz, which is to say The Fed will always attack the Demand side of the economy, never get tough with Big Bidnezz. So, Powell, just like Volcker lo those many decades ago, will crash the economy in order to placate Big Bidnezz and Big Wealth. Not that either is the main victim of Dee Feat.

The 34 Percent Solution

Well, I suppose we all knew something was coming, the only detail was what? Krazy Kyrsten stamps her little foot and says, "Me, me, me!!!"

If it acts like a terrorist, talks like a terrorist, and walks like a terrorist... well, you know.

Being some 2,000 miles from Arizona, we don't get a lot of daily news from thereabouts, although mention is made that she isn't well regarded overall. A Nader Nutball in a previous life. She's learned from him, that's for sure.

So, what's the deal? Extortion, pure and simple. She's 26% approval among Dems (I saw 19% on some news show on the teeVee, but don't find a cite; neither number is good?), so she needs Inds to overcome any MAGAmoron in '24. So, what's the gag?

Since Arizona, as almost every other state, elects based on plurality, Krazy Kyrsten is more than willing to hand the seat to a MAGAmoron if she doesn't have a chance to win. There has been reporting that Dems are more than willing to toss her out through primary. So, by jumping ship, she can run as an Ind and split the non-MAGAmoron vote. Nice girl.

[update]
The title is, naturally, fanciful. Just almost. Turns out Utah Democrat Frank Moss in 1958 (38.7 percent) got close to the ignoble number.

Thought For The Day - 9 December 2022

Just for shits and grins, consider this. Neither the Constitution nor statute mandates that the Speaker of the House of Representatives be a sitting member of said House. I haven't looked to confirm, but I'd wager that every last one, so far, has been. That is, so far, true. And the Boyle bill requiring the Speaker be a member hasn't gone anywhere.

So, and while this missive isn't the first time the notion has regurgitated from the bowels of the body politic, I say exPresident Mumford should run. He'd likely get elected. Actually win something.

It Was Twenty Years Ago ...

The lecanemab show has jogged yet another memory. Thanks. Just about 20 years ago (first run 2003, likely filmed 2002) there was a L&O:CI episode that dealt with Alzheimer's. The bad guy has the daughter of a recently dead guy killed in order to get his hands on the dead guy's brain. Yuck, I hear you say. Well... the daughter had said that she and the father would spend enough time in cryo to reach the cure for what killed them. Assuming, I suppose, discounting getting one's brains blown out in some way. With the daughter dead, the bad guy keeps the dead guy from ending up in a tube of nitrogen, and the bad guy gets the brain.

Why, you might ask? Easy enough to explain. The dead guy had been a politician who, when in a presidential race in the 70s, would blubber in newscasts. He drops out (like Muskie in that time frame, but wasn't afflicted), of course. It is later learned that he had early on-set Alzheimer's, but recovered and continued on to a brilliant time in Washington.

Enter the bad guy (well, we've seen him already...) with Binky's Brain. His intended use for the neurons is to use them (the dead guy recovered from Alz, of course) to concoct an instant cure for Alz. Did I mention that he runs a medical foundation? And that his son, some 40-ish years old, has early on-set Alz? You see where this is going. Goren and Eames have figured out the gag by now, with just a few minutes to go in the episode. They have the bad guy in the interrogation room, goading him to incriminate himself. And, of course this being teeVee, he does in spades. I can't find a transcript of the episode, so this is mostly correct from my lifelong lousy memory:

Bad guy: my team is working day and night to isolate the APOE4 gene and we'll have cure in no time! (Son is in the room, too)
Goren: so you found E4 in his brain?
Bad guy: yes, yes we have!!

Game over for the bad guy, of course. OK, so what's remarkable? How is it that a police procedural writer in 2002 knows about APOE4?

From the wiki

As of 2012, the E4 variant was the largest known genetic risk factor for late-onset sporadic Alzheimer's disease (AD) in a variety of ethnic groups.[64] However, the E4 variant does not correlate with risk in every population.

Ten years after the episode, it's common knowledge.

So, when was APOE4 proposed as a factor in Alzheimer's? 1993 is the first report of correlation. But that's in the scientific literature. A quick look at the NYT indicates some references in the late 1990s. But that's some left wing fake news, after all.

In the end, watch high brow teeVee and learn something. Well... sort of. The dialog implies that finding E4 in the dead guy's brain is a good thing, the key to the bad guy's team to make a cure for the son's affliction. My memory of the exact dialog between Goren and the bad guy is fuzzy, so it's not clear how finding E4 (which is bad) in the recovered dead guy's brain is good for the bad guy's team making a cure. Poetic license someplace.

Brainiacs

Before the lecanemab show discussed in this morning's post, there was this sitting in the queue. Time to hit Enter, I guess.

There's much ado about the lecanemab results. Here's a thread from Feuerstein and a comment, to wit:

... highly statistically significant loss of brain volume across all Rx groups in their phase-2 study?
-- MadhavThambiset

Hmm, one might say. Moreover, the SAP is Bayesian. Color me suspicious. While it may not happen soon, this drug will fail in real-world practice, same as every other anti-amyloid compound. Mammy Yokum has spoken. Hokum is hokum.

Here's a lengthy report (the great Derek Lowe).

The antibody was dosed at 10mg/kg twice a week, and the [PII] Bayesian trial was set to look for an 80% chance of a 25% or greater decline in disease progression, as measured by ADCOMS, the Alzheimer's Disease Composite Score. It missed that endpoint at the specified 12-month evaluation point, and at the 18-month point it was actually showing weaker effects than it did at 12 months.

Now, the entire point of whispering Bayes is that stat sig will be easier to find since you're only attempting to improve on 'prior knowledge', not starting from scratch

The similarity to some cancer therapies is worth keeping in mind: in oncology, if you die at the about the same time you would have otherwise, but with smaller tumors (and that only confirmed by imaging, not by quality of life), no one cares.

Ouchy!!

And talk about Ouchy!! This is an even more pointed report; may haps a takedown?

Clarity AD had a sole primary endpoint of an effect on CDR-SB versus placebo. CDR-SB is a subjective tool used by doctors to make an initial assessment of a patient's condition, but became an acceptable endpoint when in 2013 the FDA relaxed guidelines, conceding that co-primary cognitive/functional measures might prove impractical in early Alzheimer's.
...
One [question] concerns the extent to which Aria-E occurrence disclosed which patients were on lecanemab and called Clarity AD's result into question. [unblinding the arms]

And, not to ignore the obvious, this is this author's take on the PII. He is not a Bayes fan, either.

Here's the skinny on 'adaptive Bayesian' trials.

By The Numbers - part the twenty fourth

Some oddities in the numbers from last night's lecanemab show. If that means nothing to you: lecanemab is a new monoclonal antibody (MAB) said to remove Aβ from the brains of Alzheimer's patients. The 'amyloid hypothesis' asserts that Aβ accumulation in the brain is the cause of Alzheimer's. That assertion has never been proven, alas. Some in the field assert quite the opposite: that Aβ is a reaction by the immune system to the actual driver (to date unknown) of Alzheimer's.

Aduhelm was, with great controversy, approved by FDA (reportedly over the objections of its scientists and overtly by outside reviewers) last year. It is also a MAB, and is alleged to work by clearing Aβ from the brain. IIRC, Aduhelm was the first anti-Aβ (aka, disease modifying compound) to be approved. All previous therapies have been symptom reduction.

Now comes lecanemab. Two, to my reading, contradictory statements appear in the report.
First:

The researchers found that participants in both groups had a "clinical dementia rating" or CDR-SB score of about 3.2 at the start of the trial. Such a score is consistent with early Alzheimer's disease, with a higher number associated with more cognitive impairment. By 18 months, the CDR-SB score went up 1.21 points in the lecanemab group, compared with 1.66 in the placebo group.

That difference is characterized in the report as a 27% improvement with lecanemab (.45/1.66). Where things get weird is
Second:

Lecanemab, a monoclonal antibody, works by binding to amyloid beta, a hallmark of the degenerative brain disorder. At the start of the study, the participants' average amyloid level was 77.92 centiloids in the lecanemab group and 75.03 centiloids in the placebo group. By 18 months, the average amyloid level dropped 55.48 centiloids in the lecanemab group and went up 3.64 centiloids in the placebo group, the researchers found.

So, nearly 20 times greater scavenging of Aβ by lecanemab leads to a 27% improvement in decline? Color me skeptical. It would seem logical that if Aβ is driving Alzheimer's, then such a massive reduction in it should lead to a hell of a lot more benefit. Time will tell if this abyss is made a big deal of by the medical and pharma fraternity.

By The Numbers - part the twenty third

By now, unless you've been living under a rock with the RRW crowd, you're well aware that the Chinese people are fed up with Xi's 'zero-Covid' protocol. So, let's look at some of the numbers.

Population - 1.412 billion as of 2021
Number vaccinated - "As of June 4, 2022, about 87 percent of people in China had been fully vaccinated against the coronavirus COVID-19."
Number of cases - 25,835/day in last reporting week
Number of cases this date last year - 39/day
Number of cases, Omicron spike 14 April 2022 - 26,469/day
Number of cases, March 2020 to February 2022 - ~100 or fewer per day
Reported deaths - 5,232
Vaccines in use -

Sinopharm BIBP (inactivated virus)
CanSino Biologics shot (viral vector)
CanSino Biologics inhaled (viral vector)
[the wiki has further listings]
Pfizer - not yet approved
Chinese mRNA made but not approved in China

Number of lockdowns since start to 1 June 2022 - ~25
Number of Apple factories impacted by lockdown (as we speak) - 1 (so far, and it's iPhone)

What to make of all these numbers? The Xi protocol of 'zero-Covid' (aka, test/trace/isolate/lockdown) kept cases absurdly low until Covid-ο hit, and even then very low by American/European experience. And now again with the BA variants (it is believed). We know (or think we do) that the B* variants of Covid-ο are less severe than Covid-19 or Covid-ο, so it would be sensible to relax 'zero-Covid', just as the West has done. On the other hand, China does not yet have an mRNA vaccine at all, much less as the principle vaccine. There's been some talk that Xi wants to show he's a real dictator and thus won't budge; might be. Xi, meet Rock and a Hard Place.

By The Numbers - part the twenty second

Don't you just love human geometry? We've made 8 billion of ourselves. Which is to say, all at once now, not just in all of history. 8 billion.

For comparison:
1951 - 2,584,034,261 [I know, why didn't they use 1950??]
1900 - 1,600,000,000
1850 - 1,200,000,000
1804 - 1,000,000,000 [more or less, the USofA beginning]

And the RRW (of all countries, btw) want to run this little blue marble as if it's still the beginning of the 19th century. Slaves and women as chattel and all the rest. Keep on fucking, big daddy.

Ain't geometric growth powerful?

Why Do We Need The Red States, Anyway?

This is the headline on my CNN homepage this morning: "Red and blue America look like two separate nations". Yeah, so what else is new?? It's always been that way.

So, why do we? Well, we don't; they're the welfare queens of the nation. Here's a recent report on the situation. Mind, it's been this way for decades. The Red states want to party like it's 1859, but use cell phones and other accoutrements of Modern Living.

Eight of the 10 states most dependent on the federal government were Republican-voting, with the average red state receiving $1.35 per dollar spent.
The eight states receiving the highest child tax credit per capita were all Republican-voting.

Live free or die?? Not bloody likely, if they can control the Congress and keep Uncle Sugar's moolah flowing.

Somebody's Gotta Do It

It's been years since I've watched an SNL episode all the way through. Until Baldwin took on The Orange Trickster, I seldom watched at all. When HBO returned to Dish, I looked forward to Maher, but he's turned into RRW in Progressive clothing. If it weren't for Oliver, I wouldn't care about HBO. As to the late-night crew, nada. For the longest time, for reasons lost in the mists of time, I thought Kimmel was the RRW of late-night. Then I saw the headlline that he's vowed to quit if the Suits keep him from doing Trump jokes. Well!

So, I don't know if any of that cabal has yet gone here, but someone has to.

What happened to the Red Wave? Turned out to be just a bit of spotting! Which, yet again, proves that the RRW is just a bunch of whiny, bitching pussies.

Dee Feat is in Dee Flation - part the forty fifth

As regular readers well know, these missives (and those by the more famous) have been bleating the case that the post-Covid (if we really are "post", of course) inflation was/is a temporary problem; in the sense that it's not been driven by one or more of the usual suspects: wage push, cost push, demand pull. Yes, one might make a bit of a case for the third, in that about $1 trillion went unspent during much of Covid, and Sleepy Joe and the Democrats did put some bucks into households. But it's been largely a supply problem, particularly due to Xi's stupidity.

Well, we just got the latest inflation numbers (manipulated by the Socialist BLS, of course), and it's abating. One month's data does not a trend make. But we know, for sure, that Putin, Xi, and Salman have been the bad actors through all this. So the NYT writes up the story.

After stripping out food and fuel costs, both of which jump around, prices rose by 6.3 percent on an annual basis, down from 6.6 percent in the prior reading. And that core inflation measure pulled back sharply on a monthly basis, posting its slowest increase in more than a year.

That is hopeful. On the one hand, one would expect food and fuel to lead the inflation number, given: gasoline prices were supposed to kill Sleepy Joe and the Democrats. On the other hand, if the regular parts of the market basket are retreating, then that has to mean supply is closer to meeting demand. And that's what the author points out

The report provides early evidence that the Fed's campaign to slow rapid inflation may be helping to ease price pressures, working alongside recent healing in supply chains.
[my emphasis]

This was Jerome Powell's answer when he began his war on the American economy:

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell told lawmakers Wednesday that rate hikes will not bring down oil and food prices, despite their contributing the lion's share of recent inflation gains.

In an exchange with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Powell was blunt in saying that the Fed's efforts to tamp down on higher prices with higher interest rates will not impact either category.

"Chair Powell, will gas prices go down as a result of your interest rate increase?" she asked.
"I would not think so, no," he replied.
Then Warren asked, "Will the Fed's interest rate increases bring food prices down for families?"
Powell said, "I wouldn't say so, no."
He nonetheless stressed that the Fed was equipped to tackle inflation more broadly.
"We have both the tools we need and the resolve it will take to restore price stability on behalf of American families and businesses," he said, during his semiannual testimony to Congress.

And to close out this episode, here he is (you've seen it before as a week's quote)

It's not good to have monetary policy be the main game in town, let alone the only game in town. -- Jerome Powell/2019

At least, so far, he's not been a laughing Laffer.

Canary Sing To Me - part the third

If you look around widely enough, and often enough, you can spot the next Canary in the coal mine.

It's been widely believed that economic growth is a product of reproduction of humans. The tribe that begets the most wins. For decades, likely from the start, it's been an article of faith amongst Israel's right-wing tribe. Today's NYT reports

Sluggish birthrates among secular Israelis, coupled with high rates among the religious, who tend to lean right, have also gradually tipped the balance of voter demographics.

What in the USofA equates to: the great unwashed in the empty places out-breed the educated city dwellers. The Israeli problem has been documented for decades. No solution has been identified.

Oddly, or not, within the same pages is a report that the Jordan river is nearly dry.

Population growth, diminished water supplies and climate change have all taken their toll, while damaged and inefficient infrastructure and the considerable challenges posed by Jordan's geography and topography have only made things worse. The resulting shortages serve as a warning of what the future might hold for the region and the world beyond it.

Gee?? Ya think. In a moment of unpleasant serendipity, this week carried the obit of an anti-growth (population growth) economist.

And, of course, there were recent reports (I didn't follow past the headlines) that 'foreign' owned farms are harvesting water from our desertifying Southwest and shipping it back home. Where's MAGA when you really need it?

Out screwing your neighbor/enemy was a valid technique to win wars. More bodies, more boys, more soldiers, more wins. 2,000 and 3,000 years ago, that plan didn't run up against limited resources the way we have it today. At 2,000 years ago ~170 million all told. At 3,000 years ago ~40 million. Admittedly, 'resources' back then didn't encompass, for instance, petrochemical fertilizers and diesel powered tractors or Abrams tanks. Still, out fucking your enemy could be effective.

About time we figured out how to survive a depleting Mother Earth. We've only got the one, and there's not another one within the distance of chemical rockets. May be none anywhere. "The Martian" was a movie, not a plan.

Musk Ox - part the second

You know, Musk is the epitome of the Right Wingnut hypocrite. from today's news:

"Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists," he said in a tweet. "Extremely messed up! They're trying to destroy free speech in America."

Musk elides the obvious: he has stated, repeatedly, that he doesn't want moderation. Since he now owns the joint, lock stock and barrel, he'll turn it into a "a free-for-all hellscape" as soon as he thinks he can get away with it. Ya can't make money on the innterTubes without advertisers; well, unless you're Amazon.

Just days after Elon Musk assured advertisers that Twitter would not become "a free-for-all hellscape," the social media site was swamped with an outpouring of racist, sexist and antisemitic posts, along with election disinformation and bizarre conspiracy theories. The ugliest of these conspiracies were amplified by Musk himself.

Ya, he's just some anonymous apolitical bidnezzman.

As many predicted, Musk's pro-Trumpian bleeting going back years, and worse since his campaign to have Twitter, has led to a jailbreak. What did he think would happen? Is he so demented that he really believes that most Americans are MAGAists??? I guess if you grow up white in South Africa, you've no truck with those who look like they come from shithole countries. MAGA really means Make America White Again. Or, The South Shall Rise Again.

While he has naturalized, he doesn't get the Constitution. It only prohibits The Damn Gummint from restricting speech, but private enterprise is not so restricted. No one could have sued, and won against, Twitter etc. for banning them for hate speech. That pesky First Amendment has other text, which the MAGAists tend to ignore. There's that bit about no State religion; only White Evangelicals need apply. (Wouldn't be the first time. We've been through this shit before. Twice, even.) Tell that to the Thomas clan. Oh, and Jews will not replace us???? Batshit J. Moron tried his damnedest not to piss off the KKK.

Oh Canada!

Aren't Canadians said to be such nice people? Does it track that the MAGA crowd should import one to assassinate Crooked Nancy?? Well, I guess. At the least, he isn't from one of those shithole countries that Dear Leader Yo! Semite of Thigh Land just can't stand.

Cohesion

My bestest boss was Dr. McElhone, who came into my life shortly after his leaving army intelligence (yeah, I know the joke). He had his Ph.D. in math stats from Iowa State; if you don't much about math stats, Iowa State was (mid 70s) near the top of the list (currently 19th which ain't cheap cheddar). Anyway, along with stat lingo came a good deal of au courant military jargon. He spent most of his time flying in Beech Air King and Air Queens festooned with a dozen or so antennas vacuuming up various signals.

A couple of concepts he talked about rather a lot: chain of command and unit cohesion. Most civilians, self included, are familiar with the former, but less so the latter. If the Radical Right Wingnuts get their way, it will be the more material.

Unit cohesion is a military concept, defined by one former United States Chief of staff in the early 1980s as "the bonding together of soldiers in such a way as to sustain their will and commitment to each other, the unit, and mission accomplishment, despite combat or mission stress".

Why does this matter today? It's been clear, and the attack on Paul Pelosi is blazing, that the RRW no longer care about democracy. If they get their way, we will have Civil War ver. 2.0. Will our military suppress the insurrectionists, or join them?

It's clear, at least to me, that the officer corps (likes of Flynn excepted, naturally) will obey the Constitution and their oath. But what about the enlisteds? Are they dumb enough to buy into white persecution and grievance? Well, listen up.

The service on June 23 [2022] began allowing people to enlist in the regular Army without a high school diploma or GED ... The change was short-lived. Army officials reinstated the education requirement one week later.

Gulp...

During the height of the unpopular Iraq War, recruitment was falling so fast, especially among some minority groups, that Army recruiters lowered required ASVAB scores and allowed waivers for some recruits with low scores or other demerits, including minor criminal offenses. "In 2006, nearly one in five incoming soldiers did not have high school diplomas," the Boston Globe reported in 2007.

What we already know about the RRW: they prey on the feeble minded, ill-educated, poor white boys and girls from Red States. They laugh at Paul Pelosi getting hammered. Whose side would they end up on?

If Bolsonaro pulls off a military sponsored coup, how long will wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024 sit on his hands? Will Musk, a real billionaire, join in?

Thought For The Day - 31 October 2022

With Jair now history. At least for now. Batshit J. Moron must be feeling his sphincter squeezing his brains out. There's always the chance that Jair'll engineer a military coup just like, but better executed than, wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024's flaccid attempt. It's not as if it hasn't happened before.

Musk Ox

If you harbored any doubts that Musk is anything but a Radical Right Wingnut fascist, this'll disabuse you.

"There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye."

Yeah, and you're not a nutjob in disguise.

Delta Dawn - part the fourth

It's baaaaaaaack. Take a gander at the latest CDC report. A Covid-δ sub-variant has emerged, VBM so far. And, contrary to some, Covid-δ is not of the 'trade virulence for transmission' type. In its day Covid-δ was a tad more virulent than Covid-19; which it followed (well, there were a few other variants, but none ever got much of a foothold). Might be an interesting winter. And the 'experts' are, once again, speculating a trifecta: Covid, flu, and RSV. We know that RSV is hitting little kiddies, and flu is doing a number in Chile. As the (allegedly) Chinese proverb says, "may you live in interesting times". That's not a positive.

In a possible warning sign for the US and other Northern Hemisphere countries, Chile's 2022 flu season started much earlier than usual and brought more hospitalizations than during the pandemic, but the effectiveness of the vaccine against hospitalization was estimated to be almost 50%, according to a new study published by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Researchers look to the Southern Hemisphere when trying to forecast what the North American flu season might look like, and they've noted that the southern season has been particularly bad this year.

What we do know: the widely predicted bi-pandemic of flu/Covid never appeared the last two winters. The 'experts' chalked that up to the masking/distancing/vaccinating/stay-at-home regimens that were widely adopted. I've managed to avoid even a cold for the whole period. Knock on wood. Few have gotten the bi-valent Covid shot (earliest our MD can see us is the end of November; gulp), and I see lots of folks crowding into, and vewy, vewy few masks in, my local grocery store. Hmmm?

With Fauci nearly out the door, will anyone heed the lessons of Covids? Exponential growth starts with one case. China was lavished with attaBoys for its non-medicine approach to curbing Covid-19; (test, trace, isolate, lockdown) until Covid-ο showed up and blew that regime all to hell. And Xi continues to not vaccinate and to lockdown cities/regions, messing with the West's supply chain for goods.

I Told You So - 24 October 2022

OK, I've been screaming that the bout with inflation has been driven by the unusual suspects:
- Vlad
- Xi
- bin Salman

And, it turns out, climate change. You get it from the horse's mouth

"Every day there's a shortage of something," Patricio said. "It doesn't help [that] with the global warming that the crops have not been good. So there's lack of tomatoes in the world, there's lack of potatoes in the world, there's lack of beans in the world."

Not that the Radical Right Wingnuts have offered even a smidgen of plan to 'cure' the inflation bug. Well, killing Social Security and Medicare will help. Rich folks, of course. Here's the opinion of the MAGA crowd:

I can only hope that the Keep your goddamn government hands off my Medicare! people are exceptions and that a vast majority of Republican seniors understand that Medicare, Medicaid and the Veteran's Administration are all government-run health care systems. Put another way: they're actively and willingly participating in socialized medicine. So the seniors who understand the facts about the Medicare system and yet are screeching at town hall meetings about government-run health care are, well, insert your favorite colorful synonym for "freakishly colossal hypocrites" right about here.

They no cure for stupid.

Dee Feat is in Dee Flation - part the forty fourth

It likely comes as no surprise that I've a chary view of all things psych- related. While the various professions in that class have found many insights, most have then been exploited by manipulators, to suit their purposes rather than the benefit of the population. My earliest memory of learning of this situation was reading "The Hidden Persuaders" from 1957.

... Packard explored advertisers' use of consumer motivational research and other psychological techniques, including depth psychology and subliminal tactics, to manipulate expectations and induce desire for products, particularly in the American postwar era.

Kind of mind blowing, although I didn't read it in 1957; likely about a decade later.

Another insight from the psych professions is a wonderful term/phrase cognitive dissonance, which I've usually boiled down to: "believing/asserting that which is clearly non-rational". Let's see what the wiki calls it...

In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance is the perception of contradictory information, and the mental toll of it.

Well, yeah.

So, why is this essay about things psych? Well... Within the econ cabal are two camps, nearly always warring: the Radical Right and the Lunatic Left. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out where I sit. Recent reporting brings these issues to the fore.

Along with, or subsumed by one of, these cabals are the Mad-as-a-Hatter Moneterists. They are of the Radical Right; money makes the world go round, even when we know that money is an artificial, human created, figment of the imagination. Gold, silver, jewels, and cowry shells have been 'stores of value' in various cultures for various periods of time. They have little utility.

The Moneterists mantra is that inflation is solely the result of too much moolah in the economy, and therefore the only cure is to 'take away the punch bowl'. As it happens, sometimes it is true that excess moolah has invaded the economy, and resulted in inflation. In my short lifetime, the most infamous devolved from LBJ's "guns and butter" speech and subsequent actions. Excess real demand exceeded available widgets.

Q. Mr. President, from what you have outlined as your program for now, it would seem that you feel that we can have guns and butter for the foreseeable future. Do you have any idea right now, though, that down the road a piece the American people may have to face the problem of guns or butter?

THE PRESIDENT. I have not the slightest doubt but whatever it is necessary to face, the American people will face. I think that all of us know that we are now in the 5 ad month of the prosperity that has been unequaled in this Nation, and I see no reason for declaring a national emergency and I rejected that course of action earlier today when I made my decision.

I cannot foresee what next year, or the following year, or the following year will hold. I only know that the Americans will do whatever is necessary. At the moment we enjoy the good fortune of having an unparalleled period of prosperity with us, and this Government is going to do all it can to see it continue.

Which then got us the Volker destruction. It took some time, abetted by Nixon of course.

So, how then is it possible that we have 'traditional' inflation at the same time as reporting tells us that consumer demand is falling? The answer, of course, is that this is not traditional inflation. It is curtailed supply, most evident in Vlad's work, moolah hoarding during the pandemic, and the failure of Xi's Covid policy.

Quote of the Day

Overheard at Mar-a-Lago as a result of the SS transmission dump recently reported:

Where's my Rose Mary Woods!!"

-- wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024

By The Numbers - part the twenty first

"It's unclear how many draft dodgers and deserters came to Canada during the Vietnam War, but estimates are that 125,000 Americans came to Canada between 1964 and 1977."

"At least 200,000 Russians have left the country in the week since President Vladimir V. Putin announced a partial military mobilization after a series of setbacks in the country's war with Ukraine, according to figures provided by Russia's neighbors."

Well, Vlad has exceeded in a week what it took Ike, JFK, LBJ, Tricky Dick, and Clumsy Gerry 13 (or 14, depending on how you count) years. Now, that's spectacular. Yes, we can quibble about Ike, Clumsy Gerry ('official' end of Vietnam was on Tricky Dick's watch, and the lottery continued until 1975), and Jimmy (he finally reinstituted registration) being at fault, and the year count, but still.

Registration was resumed in July 1980 for men born in 1960 and later, and is in effect to this present time. Men are required to register within 30 days of their 18th birthday.

If wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024 does get in again, there'd be two reasons to secede to Canada. I mean, does some pimply 18 year old Redneck really, really want to be the latter day La Fayette Squadron in support of Vlad?? Well?

By The Numbers - part the twentieth

More storms hit Florida than any other U.S. state, and since 1851 only eighteen hurricane seasons passed without a known storm impacting the state.
-- the wiki

Oddly, at least to me, is that numbers of tropical storms aren't found on the innterTubes. After all, just one mile per hour lower than a Cat 1 is 'just a tropical storm'. Given that the highest point on the Florida penninsula is 295 feet, perhaps that's something worth knowing. If no other way, the insurance industry will de-populate Florida. Unless, of course, the Red States gang up on the rest of us and extort the funds to keep putting Humpty Dumpty back together again in the path of the next Ian.

If there is a God, Sleepy Joe told Gov. DeMented to shut the fuck up if he want's Uncle Sugar moolah.

By The Numbers - part the nineteenth

So, as you've likely read somewhere, Governor DeMented is demanding, Demanding I Say, that Sleepy Joe pay 100% of the bill for cleaning up the mess in his God forsaken state. Didn't have the same demand when Sandy devastated New York and environs. I recall, with some level of accuracy, a line from Hiaasen's "Stormy Weather" (can't find my copy, and the innterTubes various quote sites are lacking)

Those fucking flying aluminum ducks.

So, just how many mobile homes are in Fl.? Not the most, it turns out.
- 1 Texas 137,460
- 2 Florida 50,761

It would seem that Florida isn't so bad. But, wait, there's more!

Texas is so much larger than Florida, what's the measure on a density basis?
- Texas 268,596 sq. miles
- Florida 65,758 sq. miles

Therefore, we get
- Texas .51 per sq. mile
- Florida .77 per sq. mile

That's a might more. Let's see if we can find out whether those tin cans are concentrated lower on the pennisula where Ian and Andrew and most of their brethren call. From a few years ago, the #1 place to have a mobile home is Florida's Lakeland-Winter Haven metro area. Yes, the conveniently offered map shows that this area was right next to the the bull's eye for Ian. Until a day or two before Ian hit, it was the bull's eye.

I carry the legend that these are just flying aluminum ducks. Let's find out whether mobile homes can survive hurricanes. The videos from Fort Meyers, south of Winter Haven, showed a landscape that looked like it had been leveled by a bulldozer in places and nearly completely under water in others. Still not safe.

In Case You Haven't Heard - part the first

In January 2013, DeSantis — newly elected to Florida's 6th Congressional District, which covers Jacksonville through the north of Orlando — was one of the 67 House Republicans who voted against flood insurance assistance for victims of Hurricane Sandy, after it recently wreaked havoc on the New York-New Jersey area.
-- that was then

As part of this request, Governor DeSantis is also asking that President Biden approve a FEMA federal cost share of 100 percent for 60 days to support recovery efforts in the wake of Hurricane Ian.
-- this is now

Low lifes have no shame.

By The Numbers - part the eighteenth

Vlad the Imbecile is waving the nucular threat wrt Ukraine. Not the first time for Vlad, of course. By this one surmises he's talking about, so called, tactical nukes. So, what is a tactical nuke?

For example, the U.S.'s newest version of its B61 nuclear bomb can release 0.3, 1.5, 10 or 50 kilotons of explosive energy. In comparison, the Hiroshima bomb was about 15 kilotons.
-- here

Would Sleepy Joe and the fractured European NATO folks reply in kind?

[S]ome 2,000 of Russia's nuclear warheads are short-range, so-called "tactical" nuclear weapons kept in storage facilities throughout the country.
-- here

Sleepy Joe has: 230. So it happens that Sleepy Joe does have some amount of missile-delivered tactical nukes:

We estimate that one or two of the 20 missiles on the USS Tennessee and subsequent subs will be armed with the W76-2, either singly or carrying multiple warheads. Each W76-2 is estimated to have an explosive yield of about five kilotons.

If you tldr; the link, the USS Tennessee is a missile sub.

For comparison, the biggest chemical bomb has a yield of a mere 11 tons. OTOH, the largest bunker-buster (aka, penetrator weapon) carries 5,300 lbs of explosive.

By The Numbers - part the seventeenth

Back when post-Maris home run hitters got close to 60/61 for the season (not their indiviual number of games played, or at bats), carpers carped that the 154 game season was gone (1962, cute), so any 60+ season was de-valued. Don't hear that much anymore, and even the drug shooters get a pass.

Anyway, Judge went yard in game 147, so he's got 7 more for a 'legit' record and a full dozen to get it honestly.

I'm Back

Well... it turns out that fixing a fucked up Ubuntu upgrade can be salvaged. It's not possible to do it by hand, following the various recipes available on the innterTubes, for the fucked up reason that the programs/functions one needs (using just the live-USB Ubuntu) can't be built to the USB.

But, if you have access to the innterTubes with some other machine, then this program (with some help from Window's World linux support) will allow you to fix a busted MBR. It also claims to work for UEFI issues, and trolling the innterTubes finds posting attesting. There was a time, lo these many years, when I had to fix machines at the store front (for-profit, of course) 'computer school' where I taught the illiterate, unwashed, and often court-compelled, Office Automation (the term not yet au courant). The tool of choice was Norton Disk Doctor. Ah the days of PC/MS DoS.

No Class Act

The Government generally points to the alleged urgent need to conduct a risk assessment of possible unauthorized disclosure of purported 'classified records.' But there is no indication any purported 'classified records' were disclosed to anyone.
-- latest Batshit J. Moron filing/2022

Well, boy howdy! The NSA knows all, and they will have to disclose what's been going on with respect to these documents since 21 January 2021. I'm willing to bet there's a bunch of traffic between The Moron and the Russians. Trump Tower Moscow is in the offing. It wouldn't be the first time that The Moron has 'declassified and disclosed' secrets to the Russians.

Hydrogen Bombs

There've been two reports recently, touting hydrogen as a clean fuel. And, naturally, burning hydrogen in some types of engine yields only water vapor (well, some bit of NO_x). One is German locomotives, while the other is California setting 2035 as the year for autos being either electric or hydrogen.

It's worth noting that there are two kinds of hydrogen vehicles: those using hydrogen fuel cells (been around for decades) and those using a 'normal' internal combustion engine, just using liquified hydrogen rather than gasoline or diesel. The au courant meme is hydrogen as burned fuel.

So, campers, where's all that hydrogen going to come from? The (nearly, at least until humans run the tap dry) infinite supply of sea water means an infinite supply (ditto) of hydrogen. But guess what? They Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. The laws of thermodynamics dictate that you'll never harvest as much energy from a process as you inject into it; modulo nucular.

With current tech, electrolysis generally produces hydrogen at about 75 per cent efficiency. So to create a kilo of pure hydrogen fuel, which holds about 39.4kWh of energy, it takes 52.5kWh.

Of course, that's just the pure energy budget, but since the Zeppelins we don't use gaseous hydrogen. We use liquified gas, just like LNG. And it takes a wee bit of more energy budget to make LHG.

To use it as fuel, it needs to be compressed to incredible pressure (generally 5,000 to 10,000 PSI) or kept as a liquid — which means cooling it to less than -253ºC, or just 20 degrees above absolute zero.
...
So, 90 per cent efficient to make, 54 per cent efficient by the time it's in your tank — without even taking into account the energy needed to transport it.
...
So, hydrogen's pretty rubbish as a fuel for our machines.

So, we'll use a stream of wee electrons from coal fired power plants to make the hydrogen? Sounds like a plan.

Also of note; hydrogen powered cars and trucks do not constitute some new tech. Far from it. UPS, among others, adopted (a bit) of LNG powered delivery trucks years ago. And that cute emergency generator in your back yard works on the same principle of gas driven piston internal combustion. Not cutting edge.

Christmas In August

It's worth repeating: the materials listed in The Affidavit are not the haul from the subsequent search. Oh my, no. They are the stuff that Dear Leader Yo! Semite of Thigh Land didn't really want. IOW, just banal shit. He kept the Good Stuff, until the SWAT team showed up. He shoulda known the jig was up, but he is an idiot, after all.

Golf Is Odious

More than a few have taken the LIV golf series, including as one might expect the stragglers left on the PGA tour, as odious. But that's not quite my take. It's yet another example of faux competition, endemic (along with Covid and monkeypox and...) in American (and, may be, all of Western) society. Sure, it's Blood Money as the Fake News tells us many are calling LIV, but the really odious factor is that it takes another game (calling it athletics is a bit much) and turning it into another Professional Wrasttlling. We need this? Do we need yet another faux 'reality program'? Likely not

By The Numbers - part the sixteenth

Google says the original "Your content has violated our Malware and Viruses policy", but, of course don't tell me what Malware or Virus they let through. All the links were just freely available news content. Most likely one of the Trump cabal demanded it be taken down. Now you know who Google kneels to.

Fly United - part the second

The masters of the universe have been doing it for decades, and have not learned a thing. Or may be they have. May be they have learned that M&A really only exists to make the few sitting on the top of the pinhead rich, while decimating all others. Kind of like a mob or dictatorship. The bankers who finance these boondoggles never seem to catch it in the neck.

So, today we find that HBO Max is the latest victim.

Roughly 70 HBO Max staff members were laid off on Monday, job cuts that are part of a wider reorganization at the cable channel's parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery

So, as usual, the 'new' company lays waste to its workers. As if there's enough wasted labor to make up for the debt incurred. Just food for the gods.

Warner Bros. Discovery, which began as HBO's parent company in April when AT&T spun off WarnerMedia and merged it with Discovery Inc., has a crushing debt load of more than $50 billion.
[my emphasis]

Why, oh why, do these masters of the universe always, always pay outlandish, unsupportable, amounts of moolah? The answer is always the same, almost always never admitted: get big enough, and you can control the market and set prices divorced from cost. All teeVee/streaming is heading back to the glorious 50s, with a never ending ship of clones of Ted Mack (look him up). Again, the bankers and those sitting on the pinhead get rich. They get their cuts up-front, leaving the people who do the actual work to get it in the neck. This will not turn out well for those that remain. As any mob, the few sitting on the pinhead will suck out moolah up-front until the enterprise says "hello" chapter 11 or chapter 7. Just as night follows day.

Here's a rose-colored glasses of the first merger

The still-to-be-named company, which will be helmed by current Discovery Inc. CEO David Zaslav, says it wants to further invest in content—about $20 billion worth a year. That could cause the price for whatever streaming service it rolls out to rise—but will it matter if consumers feel like they don't have to pay for several different streaming services, and instead can access a cornucopia of content from just one provider?

Where's the moolah come from? The usual, debt from others

As reported by Deadline, Discovery is currently raising the $30 billion through a sale of debt using what are called senior unsecured notes. These are ways for businesses to raise money for purchases such as this. They are not backed by collateral and, as a result, carry a higher interest rate for the purchaser. They are riskier, but the interest rate helps to make them attractive.

As noted (either here or one of the many forums I inhabit) previously: in the good old days there were 3 teeVee networks (and may be, for a time, 1/2 if you count DuMont), which made audience size easily measured and controlled. Before I croak, I'll bet a dime to a donut that streaming, and surely cable/sat, will be down to a few, may be even just 3, providers.

Real Americans

TCM has, for some years now, devoted August to a Star-of-the-day programming. Today is Greta Garbo, and the ones tonight have been from her silent period. One of them is "Love", which is "Anna Karenina". My Russian period was so many decades ago, I couldn't tell you anything about the book or any of the movies made from it. I caught it about half-way through, and she's one good lookin babe.

So, we get to the end of the film, and Vronsky has found Anna's boy (he's been looking for them for three years, of course) at a riding academy who tells him that his mother visits him every day since his father died. At that moment, Anna makes her entrance; Anna and Vronsky hug and kiss and the three leave stage right with "The End".

But that's not the end. We get some text on the screen, which tells us that what we just saw was the "happy" ending demanded by the studio for American distribution, and that we'll now see the alternate (other countries) ending.

The action returns to the point where Anna is leaving St. Petersburg on a train. Instead of getting on the train, she jumps in front of it, a suicide. Hmm.

So, off to the wiki for some explanation. Turns out that the studio hot shots never read the book, so didn't know how it ended, naturally. The alternate ending fits what Tolstoy wrote. And it gets better. Kind of. According to the wiki

(American exhibitors were given the choice of whether or not to use the revised "happy" ending. Theaters on the coasts mostly picked Tolstoy while theaters in Middle America mostly picked the happy ending.)

So, naturally, the bumpkins can't deal with Russian literature. Why am I not surprised?

And, just as naturally, they'll eat a ton of bullshit from a demented would-be czar. Why am I not surprised?

Leontief

Back when I was a young whippersnapper in grad school Leontief was still au courant, and a signifcant factor in macro analysis. Alas in due time, Volker, Laffer, and other knuckleheads turned policy into nothing but worrying about currency.

Inflation drops to zero in July due to falling gas prices.
-- Axios/10 August 2022

Consumer prices were unchanged in July, as plunging prices for gasoline dragged the Consumer Price Index down to zero.

And, the secret sauce? The CPI only figures the direct prices of the commodities. What that means is what Leontief figured out: any advanced economy is a massive input-output engine. Changes in such a wide-ranging sector, energy, finds its way into most other sectors.

As many of us Left Wingnut analysts said as Covid waned (or most folks deluded themselves into believing it has), there would a supply shortage driven period of inflation, until producers were convinced that the new, higher level of demand would sustain. (See: post WWII.) And that's what happened. What the Krugman Klan didn't figure on was the reluctance of producers to resume production. Well, and Putin with a hard on for Ukraine (at least).

If the input-output model is correct, we should see a continuing fall in CPI measured inflation as falling energy prices make their way through the rest of the economy. Stay tuned.

After two straight months of extremely hot inflation readings, this report will be welcome news.

Two months? Now you know how stupid the monetarists are. While Covid-ο came and went in 3 months without any real action being taken, any blip in inflation without even a shred of evidence of fundamental change in the economy is just dumb. But, that's the way of Monetarist Policy.

By The Numbers - part the fifteenth

Not for the first time, I'll bitch about PhRMA telling the world that it costs a Billion Dollars to make a new drug. Well, it turns out that a a report on new drugs actually tells the truth

These days, the average cost, including the many failed trials along the way, is a billion dollars.
[my emphasis]

The report is about curing Type 1 diabetes, and worth your time.

It's the other pandemic, one that killed 6.7 million people last year around the world.
-- Lisa Hepner/one of the film makers covered by the report

It's also a story about a Big Pharma eating a small fish. Happens a lot; and in this case the Big Pharma is scarfing up a competitor. That happens a lot, too.

Drug Culture

There will be, as there has always been, screeching from the PhRMA cabal that giving Medicare negotiation authority will spell the end of new drugs in the USofA!!! And so on. It is still the case that PhRMA, as a whole, spends more on SG&A than R&D (that's Derek Lowe's take, who has been a bench chemist in PhRMA, is generally on the side of PhRMA). There's no shortage of moolah in the drug business. No, there is not. And, just an aside (always mentioned in essays such as this): the USofA and New Zealand are still the only real countries that permit direct-to-consumer adverts for drugs.

So, in keeping with this situation, today a Boston drug developer (Karuna) announced the successful completion of a Phase III trial of a schizophrenia drug. In the PR, the company claims

KarXT is the first potential medicine of its kind with a truly new and unique dual mechanism that does not rely on the dopaminergic or serotonergic pathway to treat symptoms of serious mental illness.

Now, that reads like gibberish to most civilians. The key verbiage is 'new and unique', which the naive` reader is coerced into believing that Karuna has 'discovered' a 'new and unique' compound. Well, not so much.

It turns out that if you wiki the active ingredient(s): xanomeline and trospium, you find that these are ancient, in new drug development terms, compounds.

Xanomeline was discovered by Lilly and Novo some 30 years ago. They gave up on it, and it eventually came to Karuna (no, I'd never heard of them either; but they are of Boston, so a bit less likely to be a scam).

In order to reduce the side effect which caused Lilly and Novo to scrap the compound, it was decided to mix in another existing compound which is known to affect said side effect. As I type, it remains a mystery why the bench chemists at Lilly and Novo couldn't figure out this synergy way back in the 90s; the compound that Karuna chose was well known at that time. The compound is trospium (synthesized in 1967).

Trospium chloride is used to treat overactive bladder.

Now, I think that's hilarious!! May be you don't. The point, naturally, is that Karuna (and whoever may have been on the ownership lineage after Lilly and Novo) spent not a penny to 'discover' their compounds. They just looked up Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients, took one from column A and one from column B (yes that's Chinese menu meme; the announcement came from Karuna's Chinese 'partner'). As I've written more than once earlier, studies of actually new compounds in recent decades have shown 90%+ based on 'free' research from the Damn Gummint.

PhRMA freeloads off the American taxpayer, full stop.

By The Numbers - part the fourteenth

Since the Religious Right Wingnut Republicans are getting ever more amped up since they got creamed in Kansas, I thought a short reminder of how the Union can be saved is in order. (Aside: the First Civil War started in Kansas from 1854, depending on how you count, just so you know.) It's goes by the name, National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, and it intends to force a majority winner of the popular vote in the Presidential election. So far as I know, anyway. Imagine: California having more say than Montana!

As of June 2022, it has been adopted by fifteen states and the District of Columbia. These states have 195 electoral votes, which is 36% of the Electoral College and 72% of the 270 votes needed to give the compact legal force.

So, twice as many votes as states, by count. The best way to end the drive for Minority Rule, peace Viktor Orban, et al. Not likely to happen before 2024, I suspect. I haven't done the arithmetic, but it's just as likely the Red states could do the same. Here's the list of small, rural states that can tip the College.

Our math went through a few iterations on this but by our final math, in 2012 that could have meant winning the presidency with only around 23 percent of the popular vote.

Note that the list does include a couple Left Wing states that wouldn't (as of today, at least) join:
- Rhode Island
- Connecticut
- DC
- Massachusetts
- and assorted purplish states

So, we can forget signing up Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, DC, Delaware, Vermont, Hawaii, Colorado, Maryland, New Jersey, and New Mexico for the Trump/Orban/Erdogan Dictatorship Sweepstakes since they have already signed the Compact. I'll leave as an exercise for the reader to check which 11 next larger states would have to be recruited. Colorado and New Mexico kind of surprised me. States 12 through 16 signed in 2018 and 2019, so the effort remains alive.

The wiki report concedes that there aren't enough Blue states (as of today, but Kansas' result may alter that) to reach 270, so at least all the Purple and perhaps a Red one or two will be needed.

About That Dog

You've likely heard the old saw about the dog that chased the garbage truck and managed to catch it? What happens next? Well the Radical Religious Right Wingnuts who got Roe v. Wade deep-sixed now know the answer: you get crushed when folks pay attention.

Kansas, not a bleeding heart Left Wing enclave, beat the shit out of them on the question (critical to the gag: put the measure on a primary ballot, which almost always has a low voter turnout - oops not this time Holmes):

The referendum question brought out a surge of new voters, with more than 800,000 people turning out, up on the 470,000 who participated in the 2018 gubernatorial primary, Insider reported.

There are a shit-load of Right Wingnut ever tighter sphinters hoping, against hope, that people will forget all about Roe and The Supremes in November. Good luck. The Inflation 'problem' will likely be resolved, in large part by both the oil industry being hoisted on its obscene profits so far, and the continuing fall in gasoline price.

This ain't a good time to be a Republican Operative.

Fly United

If you're of a certain age, you've seen the poster 'Fly United'. In the bidnezz world, M&A is the fly united meme. And it always starts with rhetoric about synergy and proposed whole being far more valuable than the existing parts. Yada, yada, yada. What really happens, for all these decades of merging, is a massive debt and equally massive cost cutting, aka reduction of product. IOW, the consumers lose. The CxO class gets richly rewarded for their 'hard decisions'. And so on.

So, another example:

The announcement of scrapping plans for the two films comes amid Warner Bros. Discovery trying to cut costs, a whopping $3 billion, in the wake of their merger in April.

American bidnezz is on your side!

I Told You So - 2 August 2022

Well, here's the report:

U.S. manufacturing activity slowed less than expected in July and there were signs that supply constraints are easing, with a measure of prices paid for inputs by factories falling to a two-year low, suggesting inflation has probably peaked.
[my emphasis]

Are You Listening to Me?

Now, how did the Good Guys track down Zawahiri without any boots on the ground? A few Fake News reports have used The Name That Shall Not Be Spoken: the NSA heard every word (text, e-mail, etc. too) in and around Zawahiri for a long, long time.

Now, don't you think they have every word (text, e-mail, etc.) passed from and to the Russians who futzed with our 2016 and 2020 elections? Don't you? The only question is whether they were as deeply co-opted by wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024 as the Secret Service.

The .75% Solution

Remember that Powell admitted that interest rate hikes wouldn't stop inflation? Here it is:

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell told lawmakers Wednesday that rate hikes will not bring down oil and food prices, despite their contributing the lion's share of recent inflation gains.

In an exchange with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Powell was blunt in saying that the Fed's efforts to tamp down on higher prices with higher interest rates will not impact either category.

"Chair Powell, will gas prices go down as a result of your interest rate increase?" she asked.

"I would not think so, no," he replied.

Then Warren asked, "Will the Fed's interest rate increases bring food prices down for families?"

Powell said, "I wouldn't say so, no."

He nonetheless stressed that the Fed was equipped to tackle inflation more broadly.

"We have both the tools we need and the resolve it will take to restore price stability on behalf of American families and businesses," he said, during his semiannual testimony to Congress.

That was just over a month ago, when the Fed did its first massive rate increase. Both Powell and the Right Wingnuts he kowtows to treat the current state of inflation as specific, and limited to, Sleepy Joe and the USofA, when, in fact, the developed world is all in a pickle.

But the U.S. is hardly the only place where people are experiencing inflationary whiplash. A Pew Research Center analysis of data from 44 advanced economies finds that, in nearly all of them, consumer prices have risen substantially since pre-pandemic times.

It's, mostly, a supply side issue (where's Laffer when it's this funny?): Russia, Ukraine, China chief amongst them. It is also true that consumers held back about $2.4 trillion in spending over the course of the pandemic. That's a good slug of moolah to unleash on wary producers, too. Producers chose to recoup lost profits all at once, and we got inflation.

All Powell is going to do is what Right Wingnuts always do before an election: stab Democrats in the back with a recession.

Ingrates

At least since the Roosevelts, Teddy and Franklin, the Democrats have used the power of the Damn Gummint to better the lives of people living in the shit-kicker counties. And, every time, said shit-kickers turn around and vote for the Right Wingnuts who've kept them poor, uneducated, and unhealthy. The Damn Gummint in Washington provides the services that the Red state, county, and local governments deem the shit-kickers don't deserve.

Now, yet again we find the Do Nothing Sleepy Joe (as both the extreme Right and Left label him) is doing for the shit-kickers what none of the other governments will. Ya think they'll vote for the Dems in the fall?? A few short months away?? Can pigs fly???

Thought For The Day - 20 July 2022

Somehow asserting that deleting texts:
- Let's go Brandon!
- MAGA uber alles!
- Hang Mike Pence

and the like as 'not work related' is the height of conspiracy. Did the Secret Service agents abet the insurrection? Did wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024 move one of his agents to the White House? Has that been done before? It appears not. There was MAGA rot everywhere.

Energy Bars

There's been a flurry of some related news of late, on the topic of climate change (warming) and alternative sources of electrons. (Aside: should the USofA really migrate from gasoline to electrons, the shock to the system will be huge; we'll become like Olde Europe with trams, trolleys, and other sorts of electrified public transportation. Oh, the horror! No more Mom driving a 2-ton SUV by her lonesome to get a bag of carrots from the MegaMart down the street. Freedom!!)

Here's a report on Hawaii's attempt to integrate solar into its infrastructure. Ain't no oil wells or coal mines out there.

Many energy companies also felt threatened by small-scale energy systems because they reduce the need for larger power plants and transmission lines. The nation's investor-owned utilities make their money typically by earning a roughly 10.5 percent return on every dollar they invest in the grid.

Ah, the Tyranny of Average Cost strikes again! If houses are allowed to have panels, only poor people will get electricity from our lines, and they'll have to pay for all those costs by themselves!

And, I'll note that my beloved Block Island got its electrons from diesel generators for ages, until the recent building and integration of a five mill wind farm in the Sound. Whether it's gotten Islanders cheaper electricity remains up in the air (if you're so inclined to disinformation), but, when the cable isn't busted, the electon delivery is more reliable. Here's some information from this past March at the 'Block Island Times'

Well, it turns out that when you add all the monthly rates and divide the sum by 12, you get an average rate of 30.02 cents per kilowatt. Using the blogger's benchmark of 54 cents per kilowatt-hour, that is a 44.41 percent decrease in electricity for year-round residents.

Of course, the summer Mainlanders in their McMansions pay more (they gobble far more electrons, naturally), but so do natives.

Another alternative to huge fossil fueled electric plants is nuclear. France gets 72% from nuclear. Nobody does it better.

But now there's talk of small scale nuclear, as if that's never been done. Really?? Among the first (if not the first) uses of nuclear outside of research and bombs was the US Navy's Nautilus sub. So, we already know how to make a city-sized nuclear reactor. There remains the question of safety of light-water reactors. Submarines have an infinite supply of water, should the reactor go dry. Are they designed to take advantage? Let's go see... apparently not. Putting some in Phoenix, and other desert towns, might not be the wisest course of action.

Finally there's the the Bloom Box. Got play on '60 Minutes' back in 2010, but not so much since. It does run on gas (the gaseous kind of gas), and emits some CO₂. Appear to have a lifetime of your average household water heater. Ouch.

Our Fathers

Now we have Highland Park. Some, the Left Wing Snowflake News pundits in particular, once again bleat, "This isn't our country! This isn't what the Founding Fathers conceived!" Well, horseshit. The Founders were insurrectionists, and fully expected that the 'new' Federal government would needs be overthrown from time to time, just as was the British. At the time, there were the 13 states along the eastern seaboard, and a vast land of resources easily (in a relative sense) taken from the red heathens. The notion of a national governance was totally foreign; getting the slave based South to agree to a Constitution which reflected an urban North required a bit compromise. On the North's side.

At the time, almost all hard currency was earned from Southern exports. He who holds the gold makes the rules.

One such insurrection was Shays' Rebellion in my home state of Massachusetts, just before the nation was official.

In a letter to William Stephens Smith on November 13, 1787, Jefferson wrote, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."

Of course, if one takes the Originalist's view, slavery is natural and the Amendments should be ignored and rescinded. If you have the notion that the early USofA was a bucolic, peaceful place, just read up this list of insurrections. The Goober Court seeks to take us back to those good times.

Whether the Second was primarily to give cover to Southern slaveholders or to keep the Federal government on its toes remains in debate. What is unambiguous is that the decades of The Founders was a USofA mostly of primitive Goobers. There was a reason that nearly anything useful came from the other side of The Pond.

Thought For The Day - 30 June 2022

Well the Radical Right Wingnut Supremes just said that it's OK to despoil what's left of Mother Earth for your kids and grandkids and so forth, just so you can have more air conditioning and crypto mines today. Just like in 1829. I'm so happy.

Zevon

Back in 2019, this was the content of a Thought posting:
All you need to know, courtesy Warren Zevon

I'm hiding in [Mar-a-Lago], I'm a desperate man Send lawyers, guns, and money The shit has hit the fan

Send lawyers, guns, and money Send lawyers, guns, and money

I read the NYT in its Dead Trees version, so it was only today that I saw this report

There were at least 433 active shooter attacks — in which one or more shooters killed or attempted to kill multiple unrelated people in a populated place — in the United States from 2000 to 2021.

Of those 433, guess how many were stopped by that Good Guy With a Gun? 12. That's 2.7%. And as the report makes clear, response to a motivated shooter, is almost never in real-time.

Most attacks captured in the data were already over before law enforcement arrived. People at the scene did intervene, sometimes shooting the attackers, but typically physically subduing them. But in about half of all cases, the attackers commited suicide or simply stopped shooting and fled.

Now, of course, the Right Wingnuts of the Supremes have decided that the wild, wild west is not, and has never been, a legacy of times past, but the forever future of the USofA. Great.

Dee Feat is in Dee Flation - part the forty third

Leave it to Liz to yell at Powell. And, in the process, get him to admit that the core of the current inflation situation is constrained (real or concocted) supply. You have read that here, naturally.

During a Senate Banking Committee hearing Wednesday, Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren urged Powell to proceed with rate hikes cautiously and avoid setting off a recession that costs millions of jobs.

Warren asked Powell if Fed rate increases will lower gas prices, which have hit record highs this month.

"I would not think so," Powell said.

Warren asked if grocery prices will go down because of the Fed's war on inflation.

"I wouldn't say so, no," Powell said.

The problem with monetary policy is: that's all it is. There is no theory of money, unlike special relativity or evolution. Yes, Dr. Keynes wrote a book that sort of said that ("The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money"), but its point was general macro. In the Real World, monetary policy is just like any other policy: make rules which favor your tribe and hurt the other tribe.

The Rabbit Died

It's been mentioned here a few times; some of the more exotic fringe 'scientists' were asserting nearly at the beginning of Covid-19 that it would, inevitably, devolve into another (the fifth) common cold virus. That was soon proven wrong with Covid-ε, Covid-γ, and, ultimately, Covid-δ which were all a tad more virulent, but less contagious. Then along came Covid-ο which proved to be spectacularly contagious, yet much less virulent (geezers excepted, of course).

In today's NYT (dead trees division), we find that the notion of viruses always devolving to more contagious, less virulent, strains to be proven spectacularly wrong.

"There's been this dominant narrative that natural forces are going to solve this pandemic for us," said Aris Katzourakis, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford.

But there is no such natural law.

In the situation reported, it all began with a farmer in Australia who liked to hunt small game and, for reasons not explained, chose rabbits. It happens that rabbits aren't native to Australia, so he imported some for his farm. I suppose he expected to keep their numbers in check by shooting them with sufficient regularity. Turned out, he didn't. They multiplied like rabbits. Turns out, that's not just a meme.

Without natural predators or pathogens to hold them back, they multiplied by the millions, eating enough vegetation to threaten native wildlife and sheep ranches across the continent.

So, the authorities, with scientific assistance, found a virus that infected rabbits (and, so far, only rabbits).

The virus did a bang up job. But virulence began to decline. And then, it didn't.

Newer viral lineages killed more of the lab rabbits. And they often did so in a new way: by shutting down the animals' immune systems. The rabbits' gut bacteria, normally harmless, multiplied and caused lethal infections.

Dum, dah, dum dum.

"We don't know what the next step in evolution will be," Dr. Katzourakis warned. "That chapter in the trajectory of virulence evolution has yet to be written."

The scientists have said to prepare for another Covid Winter. Listen to them.

The Tyranny of Average Cost - part the nineteenth

With the spectre of inflation, supply chain angst, and the quit rate, here's a NYT report that adds some useful historic perspective. Henry Ford built a soup-to-nuts production process, which is what is described. The point was to keep control of the entire production process, so that meant starting with natural resources and ending with a bunch of Model T's. The olde A&P did something similar in the 50's and 60's with food production.

Yet his management philosophy — and especially his vigilance against getting pinched by suppliers — yields powerful insights about the culprits and lessons of the Great Supply Chain Disruption, which has become a leading source of inflation and product shortages.

What's changed since the making of Rouge, more than anything else, is the Tyranny: the example in the report is computer chips. Put simply, the variety of chips used (800), and the capital equipment needed to make them, makes it infeasible for one customer (Ford Motor Company) to drive down average cost of each chip with such a small output. Which is the reason the number of chip foundaries is down to a handful, with TSMC and Samsung holding about 60%. ASML is the (nearly) sole supplier of lithography machines:

After reporting earnings in July 2021, the company said they had a near monopoly for machines used by TSMC and Samsung Electronics to make the advanced chips. The electronics manufacturers use Extreme ultraviolet lithography equipment to make the latest generations of chips.

Intel, hoping to regain footing, is working with ASML on next-generation machines. The point, kind of obvious, is that neither Ford nor any other end-user of chips can justify so much capital on so little output. That's also the reason that X86 and ARM have become the source of nearly all full spectrum chips. Embedded controller chips, many made on decades old designs and nodes, have a bit more sources.

But chip companies have catered heavily to their investors by limiting their capacity — a strategy to maintain high prices. Shortages of truck drivers and warehouse workers are frequently the result of the downgrading of such jobs, with wages cut as a way to reward shareholders.

Henry was a nasty guy, by today's standards, but he raised blue-collar pay in order to keep them in the building, and the economy running. Oddly, some of today's Tech Titans managed to get away with what Henry was doing until the Dodge brothers, and a court, stopped him: limit dividends and capital dispersion to shareholders. While a white supremacist and anti-Semite, he understood that the macro effects of his business were a Good Thing to much of the rest of the population.

Thought For The Day - 9 June 2022

One might wonder whether Phil, and his pals, appreciate that their new-found moolah comes courtesy of you folks paying $5 per gallon of gasoline. And a dead journalist or two.

By The Numbers - part the thirteenth

So, isn't America Great Again??? We lead the world in school shooting deaths. To see the strength of our resolve, here are the numbers. MAGA has 288 kids killed in school by guns (that number may not reflect the latest tally of dead in Uvalde), while Mexico is second with 8. Odd that the originalist Constitutionalists don't assert what is plain in the document, circa 1800: every free white man is allowed, should he be a member of a state militia, to hold a muzzle loading flintlock rifle. That's it.

Jackpot!

It's official

Covid-19 has killed at least 1,000,037 people and infected about 82.7 million in the United States since January 2020, according to data by Johns Hopkins University.

I Told You So - 4 May 2022

Well, now we hear from the Lamestream Media calling out just the issue raised in these missives some time ago.

[I]f Alito's opinion is ultimately rendered, it will represent an opening salvo in a push to target other rights grounded in privacy and liberty. It will also destabilize the law by rendering the legal doctrine of stare decisis -- the notion that courts should follow their precedents even if they disagree with them, to protect the cohesion of the law -- a dead letter. And it will raise new questions about the politicization of the court.

Recall what was proposed in these missives: if there is no right to privacy, Sleepy Joe can let loose the dogs of investigation without regard to anything at all. And so can Big Bidnezz. And so can any Fascist administration that may follow. Sleepy Joe just wants to put the insurrectionists in prison. The Fascists want to put anyone not still living like it's 1829 in prison. Big Bidnezz wants to stop any revelations about bad goods, or pollution, or sexual harassment, or racial profiling, or ... Say or write anything that pisses off the Snappy Cracky Co., and you'll find everything in your life ripped open for them to see. What did Huxley call it?? "Brave New World".

"If there's a majority of justices no longer willing to recognize such a right [to privacy] in the context of abortion -- indeed, who believe the court should never have recognized it -- then that calls into question those other rights, as well," [Steve Vladeck] said.

Let's party like it's 1789!! Bring your wenches and your slaves! Don't bring your children; they've work to do in mills and on farms.

Thought For The Day - 25 April 2022 [update]

Bet on this. If Musk does get his hands on Twitter, that very minute he'll pull in wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024 and the rest of the Qanon traitors. Twitter becomes 100% Right Wingnuts 100% of the time. Will sane folks stay on?? Seems unlikely. Batshit J. Moron's bespoke social network has floundered, which is to say; there really aren't as many crazies as the Right Wingnut Reichstag would have the world believe.

[3:13 pm the countdown begins]

Splainin Trump - part the second

A new-ish series; first installment was some years ago, but now that wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024 is being pushed past even his unlimited limits by Gov. DeMented, he's more regularly goining nutsoid. I couldn't be happier.

Today he breaks wind.

Wind turbines are an icon for the energy transition and the subject of heated debate in Washington. They've been mocked by prominent members of the GOP, including former President Donald Trump, who recently called wind the "worst form of energy."

Here's the full quote, from the link:

It's so sad when you see that they are approving these windmills — worst form of energy, the most expensive. You talk about carbon emissions, well they are making them. More goes into the air than if you ran something for 30 years. When operating properly, wind turbines do not create carbon emissions as a result of electricity generation, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

So, let's look into the expensive allegation. Well, no. But, of course, this analysis is from the lying Woke Left Gummint.

Land-based utility-scale wind is one of the lowest-priced energy sources available today, costing 1-2 cents per kilowatt-hour after the production tax credit. Because the electricity from wind farms is sold at a fixed price over a long period of time (e.g. 20+ years) and its fuel is free, wind energy mitigates the price uncertainty that fuel costs add to traditional sources of energy.

But, from the point of view of the fossil fuel cabal, any large scale form of electric power which isn't fossil fuel driven is a threat. The problem with an electric based society/economy (which wind, hydro, and solar make feasible) is that the transport sector, currently fueled by gasoline and diesel, can't easily leverage it. Yes, there remains the wet dream of battery powered cars everywhere, and may be trucks, but that dream depends on a very long term source of, at least, nickel and lithium. But we already know how to leverage electricity in transport: Europe has been doing it for about a century, electrified trains and trolleys. But that means cities gain sway, since laying track into the hinterlands (which the USofA had before GM put an end to it) these days counters the Real Americans live in the rural places truth. My father was born in 1915, and said that he could go between Springfield and Boston on trolleys, town to town. Turns out, he wasn't lying. Here's the Boston end.

And another bit of history.

The Hartford & Springfield was a very important piece of the electric railway system in New England. It was not only the link between the upper and lower Connecticut Valley, but it was also the only link between the entire street railway network of southern and northern New England. This connection allowed travelers to travel between New York and Boston by trolley.

Given the bias in elections, which the Right Wingnuts have been augmenting since 2020, the "I ain't giving up my F-150 and my dog for no trolley!" attitude, they rural rubes wouldn't even take it even if it's free. Freedom!!!!!!