Food for Thought

Today brings yet another nutball bill from the MAGAmorons, this time in Louisiana. About what you might expect. The intent is to create a state-level drug schedule for the abortion pills. Whether a state can enforce such a 'ban' isn't addressed in the report. My guess is - no.

And, just for the record, Louisiana is fourth on the list of states with malnourished kids. IOW, ya caint feed the ones ya got. They're all Deep Red States, land of the oligarches. Morons.

Stupid Pen Tricks

For reasons unknown, Pilot no longer sells G2 extra-fine (.5mm) purple refills, but (as of today) one can still buy the plastic body pen with that refill. Amazon also sells 6 and 12 packs. So I ordered a 6 pack, figuring that would be enough to get me to a visit with St. Peter, as the most use I get writing is the NYT crossword (pencil on Friday and Saturday; at least in the crossworld I'm not a masochist).

Well, boy howdy, not what I was expecting. They arrived in an anonymous plastic baggie, not the normal blister pack. Hmmm. And, what is more disturbing, they didn't come with the nib beenie. Say, what? The refills I've gotten before, in the blister pack, have a dot of some sort of dark plasticy cap over the nib to reduce drying out. The top/back of the G2 refill has a hole in it to permit ink flow, but both of my G2 Limited (the fancy metal body jobbie) pens had some sort of grease inside when I went to change refill. Another Hmmm. Turns out, the G2 refill has a plug atop/behind the ink to either/both stop the ink from running out the barrel or drying. Letting my fingers do the walking through the Yellow Googles turned up many reports that this plug fluid leaks. And it's sticky, at least when it finds its way into the pen barrel. Lots of Dawn to get rid of it.

But what to do with 6 refills without condoms?? I seriously doubt they'll last more than a year or two without drying to useless, much less the time it'll take me to see St. Peter, assuming I don't get hit by a truck driven by a sub-GED MAGAmoron shortly. What to do? What to do??

Well, turns out, again, that I've used a substance called Shoe Goo, available at most megaMarts. It's avowed purpose is to repair shoe surfaces, as you might expect. But if you dip the nib, before use of course, into the bubble of it and let it cure for a day or two, you get a nice homemade condom for your refill. I tested on an old, nearly empty refill, and it sealed and the goo hardened well enough to pull off without damaging the nib and writes just fine. At least, for the ones I've tried this on.

This trick should work with any metal tip refill. Just don't leave the refill sitting nib end up while the goo cures, since there's a chance it will migrate into the barrel in the space between the nib and ball. Don't you just hate migration?

By The Numbers - part the fifty third

Once again, it's looking a bit like deja-vu all over again. It's ancient history, but Blythe Masters sowed the seeds of the Great Recession (the CDS) in order for the 1% to get richer. These days, the microscope has mostly been on the peril of commercial real estate, you know the kind the Orange Jesus claims to be master of.

But, today we find another scam that could, in tandem with commercial real estate, generate another Great Recession: nonbank residential mortgages. Who knew? The financial pros, of course, who've done nothing, it appears, to rein in the scammers.

As of 2022, nonbank mortgage companies originated about two-thirds of US mortgages and owned the servicing rights on 54% of mortgage balances, according to FSOC. That's up significantly from 2008.

In fact, nonbank mortgage servicers hold the servicing rights on nearly $6.3 trillion in unpaid balances on agency-backed mortgages — representing 70% of the total.

Oops.

Reining in the crooks is a whack-a-mole exercise with an infinite loop. Just put them agin the wall and shoot the motherfuckers. Do that a few times, and the scammers' risk/reward analysis will flip. I hear Xi and his predecessors worldwide have used that technique successfully over the millennia. Mostly to benefit themselves rather than the citizenry at large, of course. It's not as if the dictator crowd give a rat's sphincter about the citizenry at large.

It's not as if it's not happened before. D'oh

"Nonbank mortgage firms are thinly capitalized, which makes them vulnerable to failure if they lose financing or mortgage defaults spike," said McCoy, a former mortgage regulator. "Starting in early 2007, we saw a tsunami of nonbank mortgage firms fail precisely for these reasons."

You've been warned.

History and Traditions - part the first

Since the MAGAmorons have used 'history and traditions' of the USofA (and, of course, 12th century clerics) to justify reactionary, regressive, and repressive judicial law making from the bench, how will they rule when some wingnut sues that gene therapies are against God's will? I mean, IVF is just that. And we know how that's working out.

Today brings news of a major win for gene therapies

Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ: REGN) today announced that the investigational gene therapy DB-OTO improved hearing to normal levels in one child (dosed at 11 months of age) within 24 weeks, and initial hearing improvements were observed in a second child (dosed at 4 years of age) at a 6-week assessment. Both children were born with profound genetic deafness due to variants of the otoferlin gene...

Naturally, these wingnuts never ask the obvious question: "If God is perfect how did he screw up these kids?" Or does s/he just get jollies from making some number of humans at least miserable?

Life Imitates Art

You likely know the ancient saying, 'art imitates life'? Well, every so often (not so often) life is seen to imitate art. Here's a 2003 L&O:CI episode, in which there are three protagonists (not counting the L&O:CI cast). One is a youngish fellow, his fiance, and his father. Secondary to them is the daughter to a geezer who has just died, and is the obligatory murder victim.

The murder occurs because geezer's daughter had arranged for the geezer to be cryo-ed, but someone (we don't know who or why for a while) objects and has her killed.

It turns out, we eventually know, the geezer had overcome Alzheimer's decades earlier and the youngish fellow is revealed to be an early-onset victim, and his father (a rich white guy, of course) wants the geezer's brain to get a cure for his son. A bit far-fetched, especially in 2003. Turns out, life is imitating art.

The crux of the matter: in the episode -

Father: My team is on the verge of isolating the mechanism in his brain that produced high levels of the APoE2 protein. That's the key!
Goren: You found high levels of E2 in Kitteridge's brain?

The jig is up on Dad, and so forth.

So, today's NYT has a report which tells us that APOE2 does, in fact, protect (to some extent) against Alzheimer's, and that APOE4 is causative. And the bit about getting hold of Kitteridge's brain isn't farfetched now -

Another gene-therapy approach being studied involves injecting APOE2 into patients' brains.

Ain't science grand? Well, not for the MARF^™(party like it's 1829) crowd.

I Told You So - 5 May 2024

Once again, the prediction has come true. Mostly. On more than one occasion these missives have reacted to some Left Wing Pansy bleating "This is not the America we've always been!!! We're so much better than this, and always have been!!". And I called bullshit on this fantasy. The USofA has always been driven by economic/religious hegemony of the few 'chosen' over the hoi polloi. In order to pull off this stunt, the 'chosen' have to flummox enough of the hoi polloi into believing that the problem is some 'other' in the country. A great line from "The Usual Suspects":

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist. And like that... he is gone.

One might date the turning of the tide, if only temporarily, to either Brown vs. Board of Education (1954) (good luck getting the same decision from the Kurrent Kohort of Klowns) or, only shortly earlier (1948), Truman's desegregation of the military. IOW, Alzheimer's Ronnie was just gaslighting the numbskulls (and winking at the KKK crowd) with the "Shining City on a Hill" speech.

Either way, about half-a-century isn't the history of the USofA. Many's the time I've referenced the socio-economic desert of 19th century USofA, a time the reactionary crowd wants for good - MARF^™(party like it's 1829): 1% well off, and 99% lving subsistence. And, of course, being preached to that there's Pie in Sky when you're dead and that, as awful as your life is here on Mother Earth, you're superior to the Black and Red folks. Always nice to know that there's some lower on the totem pole (he he).

Well, todays NYT has an essay, from a professional historian (I'm not), which fleshes out the story.

What they have failed to grasp is that American illiberalism is deeply rooted in our past and fed by practices, relationships and sensibilities that have been close to the surface, even when they haven't exploded into view.

The Orange Jesus isn't sui generis, but just the latest in a long line of obsessed egomaniacs gaslighting the 99% so the 1% can live well. And doing so with rhetoric based on tribalism and religiosity.

The lab where Josef Mengele worked received support from the Rockefeller Foundation. White Protestant fundamentalism reigned in towns and the countryside. And the Immigration Act of 1924 set limits on the number of newcomers, especially those from Southern and Eastern Europe, who were thought to be politically and culturally unassimilable.

And you might have thought the 'shithole country' problem was invented by wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024? There was some time when even fishbelly White Irish were from a shithole country.

In sum:

"What I find most repulsive in America is not the extreme freedom reigning there," Tocqueville wrote, "but the shortage of guarantees against tyranny." He pointed to communities "taking justice into their own hands," and warned that "associations of plain citizens can compose very rich, influential, and powerful bodies, in other words, aristocratic bodies."

It's long been my view that the short respite from tyranny after WWII until the mid-70s (when OPEC's embargo re-opened the schism) was due to the fact that much of American leadership, both public and private, still lived in the "we're all in this together" mindset of the War they had recently fought in. As these leaders fell away, the cancer of despotism grew in their place. Will the cancer consume the USofA? Only The Shadow knows.