The Totally Unhinged - part the first

And so we begin a new series: The Totally Unhinged. And we begin, appropriately, with Huckabee Daddy. His chat with Carlson has been reported widely, One such.

The US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee has said it would be "fine" if Israel took control of a vast swathe of the Middle East, drawing a swift rebuke from regional and other majority-Muslim states.

Suggesting even nominal support for Israeli sovereignty over much of the Middle East is an unprecedented departure from American foreign policy. It also goes well beyond what much of Israel's far-right is willing to call for publicly.

Nearly every Middle Eastern country aside from Israel condemned Huckabee's comments in a joint statement on Sunday.

In an interview with US conservative commentator Tucker Carlson, the ambassador was asked about his understanding of a biblical verse suggesting that land including parts of Egypt, Syria and Iraq had been divinely promised to the Jewish people.

Carlson said that according to the Old Testament, the boundaries would be "basically the entire Middle East."

He continued: "Does Israel have the right to that land?"

"Not sure we'd go that far," Huckabee said in reply. "It would be a big piece of land."

Carlson then pressed him: "Does Israel have the right to that land?"

"It would be fine if they took it all," Huckabee responded, before adding: "I don't think that's what we're talking about here today."

It was Karl Marx who opined: "Religion is the opium of the people". It is nutballs like Huckabee that proves him right. And, of course, it is why the diests Founding Fathers chose to separate Church and State. It reared its ugly head during the Second Great Awakening (oft times linked here), not long after the Founding.

The BBC (and some others) included this more explicit bit about the extent

In the interview, released on Friday, Carlson pressed the ambassador on his interpretation of a Bible verse which the host claimed suggested Israel had a right to the land between the River Nile in Egypt and the Euphrates in Syria and Iraq.

Huckabee said "it would be a big piece of land" but stressed that "I don't think that's what we're talking about here today".

Now, it must be remembered that the Israelites held sovereignty over a small bit of the current Middle East for about 200 years, 3,000 years ago. And the only explicit "statement" of this essentially infinite sovereignity is just the Old Testament. The Israelites wrote the book that gave them the Middle East. Or, to put it yet another way: Native Americans held sovereignty over the North American continent continuously for at least 10,000 years before White People invaded. Don't they have a much stronger case for recompense? Yes?? Oh, right. They're heathens.

Thought For The Day - 20 February 2026

Well... boy howdy!!! The Gang of Six didn't prevail. The three most rabid members dissented, to be expected. What is hilarious is that The Trippy Three complain

[Kavanaugh] noted discussion at oral arguments about how such a refund process was likely to be a "mess."

Well... it was Ayatollah 49% Don^© who made the mess. "Clean up on aisle 666!!" Any fifth grader knows from his/her Social Studies class which branch has taxing and tariff power. It ain't El Jefe.

Thought For The Day - 15 February 2026

NASCAR is primitive car racing, at best. I'm a Formula 1 junky since Jimmy Clark. But, I'll generally peek in at the Daytona 500 now and then. A car race that only turns left is dumb. Pebble Beach is much more interesting, at least today. Go Scottie!!

Which brings up MAGA, dontcha know?? Last time I peeked, Toyota held the top 4 places. A few dozen or so laps to go, but c'mon. NASCAR is moonshine racing, not anything resembling sophistication. Ayatollah 49% Don^© should make yet another EO and ban foreign cars. drivers, and owners from the sport. This is AMERICA after all!!! Be true to your school.

Block Island News

We've been going over to the Island for at least a couple of decades, generally in what's called "Shoulder Seasons", which translates to very early Spring and very late Autumn. Not so many silly tourists around. Turns out, the Native Block Islanders have been conducting an annual census for longer than we've been going over. To attempt to get a more or less accurate count, deep off season was chosen. Not too many day hopping mainlanders. Near as I can find, one doesn't have to show some form of Block Island (aka, New Shoreham, RI) ID to be counted. But, to discourage day hoppers from mucking up the count, said count is conducted after that last boat leaves.

Did I mention that the appointed day is Groundhog Day?? Well, yes it is. And, no, Block Island has no indigenous rodents of that description. Small detail. So, as one might expect of the Frequent and Enthusiastic Visitor, there is a yearning To Be Counted. We do "own" a small parcel of Block Island, but not enough to live in all year. So, it'd not be really cheating to Be Counted. OTOH, getting to the Island on 2 Feb. is dependent on the weather. Alas, pretty shitty this year. And all of the ones preceding. Or so I remember it. And one needs to find accommodation, of course. Not all that many open year round.

Not all years is the count published in the Block Island Times in a timely manner. But we mainlanders do get it timely this year: 1,014. The common wisdom is that the Island has a resident population of about 1,000. So it appears. No mention of how many were/are Frequent and Enthusiastic Visitors.

It's Rutting Season - part the second

It all began, IIRC, with that commie pinko professor from my undergraduate days: that Eccles was right. And, more to the point, that the USofA economy would not benefit from a morphing into the Switzerland of the Western Hemisphere. A number of essays here made such an assertion. Here is previous from 2013 (some go back to the beginning of this endeavor).

So, it was with some pride that I got here years before one of my more famous brethren. It must be noted that the author isn't of the tribe of commie pinko professors: he's "the chief economist at American Compass, a conservative economic think tank". But it is more true today than way back when. A few nuggets follow.

Since Mary Poppins's day, the financial sector as a whole — investment banks, hedge funds, private equity firms, cryptocurrency platforms and all the rest of it — has exploded as a share of the United States' gross domestic product. It now claims the highest share of corporate profits and attracts the highest share of top talent from top schools, in part by offering the highest compensation. But actual business investment has declined, to an average of 2.9 percent of G.D.P. over the past decade from 5.2 percent in the 1960s, when the film was released.

Yes, some of us took note of Blythe Masters folly at the time. Didn't stop the implosion from happening.

So, what do banks actually do these days, you might ask? Not much productive.

Less than 10 percent of Goldman's work in 2024, measured by revenue, was helping businesses raise capital. Loans of Goldman's own funds to operating businesses accounted for less than 2 percent of its assets. At JPMorgan Chase the figures were 4 and 5 percent; at Morgan Stanley, 7 and 2 percent. Even the efforts at helping to raise capital are misleading, because less than a tenth of it goes toward building anything new. The rest funds debt refinancing, balance sheet restructuring and mergers and acquisitions.

What's that Dire Straits line? "Money for nothing and chicks for free". And, of course, Jeffrey.

So few resources have gone toward new equipment, toward developing better ways to do things and toward hiring and training that productivity in America's manufacturing sector — the output generated per hour of labor — has been falling. More workers are now needed than in 2012 for the same result.

This should not be possible in a functional capitalist economy. In the past 20 years, the United States has gone from leading China in 60 of the 64 "frontier technologies" identified by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute to now trailing in all but seven.

Now, that's progress!! One might say: "oddly, no mention of Trump's pledge to restore American manufacturing??" Cass is, of course, still a card carrying member of the Right Wingnut/MAGA brigade, so I suppose he does have to mince words a bit.

I'll close with this tidbit, which I've long forgotten:

We should ban stock buybacks, which were illegal until the 1980s.

(It was 1982.)

More interesting, while that ends the graph, here's how it begins

We should reform our laws so that when companies go belly up, workers and their communities get to join the line for compensation ahead of the lenders who financed the mess.

Now, I don't know about you, but those are the words of a Traitor To His Tribe.

Almost 3

Well, another missed opportunity to catch up with Kent State. Here. American Stasi on parade. This is exactly what the Trump Base want.

By The Numbers - part the ninety eighth

Frosty the snowman...

The weathercritters are saying that much of Florida will have low temps at or below 32° over the weekend. So... is this the usual? Or has the freqency of freezing temps in Fla. lower than it used to be?

The star attraction is the 1894/95 Great Freeze. Some mentions elsewhere use this event(s) as proof that climate change is bogus!! While there have been ongoing freezes since then, some of which reside in my own long-term memory, this was a (so far) unique event. The wiki piece states that Orlando fell to a record 18°; my Google Weather app says that Orlando will bottom out at 26° on Sunday.

Here's a table for Orlando 32° days from 1892. Just from eyeballing, it's 'true' that the frequency (overall) has markedly decreased from 1892 to now. Who wooda thunk it? Although the volatility (by which I mean the range of 32° days for spans of years is now narrower), also from just eye-balling, appears greater now than way-back-when. That would conform to the results reported below. Here's the top ten years (5⁺ days in a year)

2010
1989
1985
1981
1977
1970
1958
1938
1935
1928
1927
1918
1908

1938 and earlier lead by a nose.

2010, oops, has the most at 12. May be we can find out why.

There's an old saying among the weather geeks: if you know where the jet stream is going, you know what the weather will be.

In general, may be. Here's a report from MIT (bastion of liberal bias), which describes how the northern jets are affected by climate change (global warming). In a nutshell: it's the historical overall temperature difference between polar air and mid-latitude air. The greater that difference, the jets move (more or less) in a circle around the North Pole at latitude well above the good old USofA. The jets don't fall south, allowing polar airmass to visit the lower 48. It's established that the Arctic is warming much faster than the rest of the planet. As the temperature difference narrows, the jets get hinky. The lower 48 gets uncomfortable. You can thank climate change.

NOAA's latest report. Why Ayatollah 49% Don^© forgot to scrub this, I don't know. Get it before it goes.

The last 10 years are the 10 warmest on record in the Arctic.