Give Us Barrabas

While The Real President Trump, bought and paid for slurps the Evangelical Reactionary Radical Right Wingnuts and Prosperity Gospel hypocrites, the last (and perhaps only?) truly Christian President has died. 100 ain't a bad run, for sure.

"We are prepared to act with the compassion that has traditionally characterized the United States when confronted with such situations of human crisis," Carter said in a statement released by the White House as he announced the new policy. "Thousands of human lives are at stake."

Can you imagine the Make America White Again el Chefe doing anything for those not of the Billionaire Boys Club class? Of course not.

Long ago, in political time, the first person (I've no idea who, for sure) noted about The Yellow Bellied Jesus lived by the code: cruelty is the point. Although this likely establishes some copyright.

It's Funny - part the first

We're starting to see that soonToBePresident Huey Long 2024^© and his merry band of billionaire thieves misjudged the scope of MAGAnaut-ism.

They clearly figured that the MAGAnaut conspiracy was made up of, exclusively, sub-GED knuckledraggers who were infinitely gullible, and that such would be pleased as punch if the over-educated, over-paid city folk took one in the neck. Well... turns out, not so much. A fair portion of MAGAWorld are a cut above sub-GED knuckledragger, and expected that they'd be the beneficiaries of the various crackdowns on the immigrants and Elites and the various tax cuts. After all, they're the deserving ones. They didn't expect to be in the firing line of the ever-greedy Musk Ox and soonToBePresident Huey Long 2024^© and that Indian Guy.

There is no honour among thieves. As it ever were.

"If you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be. That enables the whole TEAM to win," Musk wrote on X.

Of course, the winner isn't the TEAM, but the owner, remember??? Cheap labour is the theme. As it always has been, since New England manufacture moved to the slave holding South. "We're in the Money".

It bears repeating: these Indians, and others, come to US university to get the BEST engineering/medical/etc. education; not the shit they get in Peshawar. The ones that do get their degrees in Peshawar (and such), come here as "Freshers" to do the low level shit work for pennies. I've known dozens of them in IT. You can check it out.

The Musk Ox and the Indian Guy are lying, of course. Just as New England mill owners in the 19^th century went for the cheapest labour, so too does "Tech" today. The problem is age old: if everybody does what you do, what happens next? If all labour is reduced to slave wages, as in the Red States, who'll buy the stuff that does get made? From the 50,000 foot perspective, slave labour states export to high wage states; the latter, of course, are the importers. All those cheap (Boeing hopes) 787s made in South Carolina go to rich states. That's been the case for millennia. soonToBePresident Huey Long 2024^© isn't going to change that, even if he could.

In the past it sort of worked because white people were expanding into Indian (sorry, but that's what it was called then) territory, breeding like cockroaches, and in need of basics. Manufacture was there to help. These days, manufacture has gone off-shore for yet cheaper labour, and employment is shifting more and more to financial services which cater to the well-to-do. In other words, not the general population. The MAGAnauts are merely cannon fodder in the continuing Culture War.

The Blue Collar Middle Class, RIP, existed because the Damn Gummint supported their war with capital. Not so much now. Way too many MAGAnauts won't connect the dots. They rail against The Elites, yet MAGA politicians are nearly all (MTG excepted) of the financial elite. Name me a handful of billionaires who are Progressive, or even middle of the road Democrats. You can't.

Journey

It's likely that your professor/instructor/TA said something like this as s/he began the first meeting of your Calculus 101 course:

Calculus isn't all that difficult. If you can grasp the concept of The Limit, you're 90% there.

Well... not so much. There's a fearsome amount of algebra along the way of your 2, 3, or 4 semester (term) journey. If you get through unscathed, you might opt for diff eq next. Unless you're a maths major, in which case it isn't a choice.

It's also likely that your professor/instructor/TA said something like this as s/he began the first meeting of your Baby Stats course:

Statistics isn't all that difficult. If you can grasp the concept of Correlation, you're 90% there.

Well... again, not so much. There's a fearsome amount of algebra along the way; if your intention is beyond Baby Stats. Many take one semester/term Baby Stats courses without any intention of further study, and their previous experience with something math-y was whatever constituted Senior Math in high school; likely trig. High schools now routinely offer calculus, but not as a requirement.

And therein lies the rub. I suspect it's because sports data are routinely referred as "statistics", that the general population views the study as trivial. 99.44% of folks think that's all there is to "statistics". It ain't so simple. Of the myriad fields of study that are categorized as STEM, I'd wager stats is the one mostly (only?) viewed as something one can 'pick up at work' or such. And that is the result of a host of stat packs that go all the way back to big iron mainframes and the likes of BMDP, and have continued to SAS and SPSS and R run on the PC. Anyone with a pile of data, a stat pack (and R is 'free'), and said PC can 'do statistics'. Gad.

Would you drive across a bridge that was designed by a civil engineer who 'picked it up' watching a real one in the office? I thought not. But you'll consume "statistics" run by folks who don't have a clue and/or a nasty (from your point of view, of course) agenda. You get what you pay for.

And there's a problem

I know more about nuclear weapons than he'll ever know.

So sayeth the BA in real estate econ. That link is a treaure trove more. It's disquieting seeing them all in one place. There will be more, I guarantee it.

It's going to be a rocky ride. The Office of Data Integrity will likely be run by Trump's Chef. And the Office of Media Integrity by Steve Bannon.

Bait

You'd think by now that the Lamestream Press would have figured out soonToBePresident Huey Long 2024^©. Apparently not. He starts a fuss over stupid shit he threatens to do: Panama, Greenland, Canada, death penalty; knowing full well that the Lamestream Press will take the bait. "He's such an ass!!" And so forth. While the Lamestream Press is all up in high dudgeon over this stupid shit, soonToBePresident Huey Long 2024^© gets the lap dog Congress to do what The Musk Ox (and the rest of his Billionaire Boys Club buddies) want: a trillion or so dollars off their tax bills. Not paid for of course. As if making the obscenely rich even richer will propel GDP growth.

By The Numbers - part the eighty second

Just to catch y'all up on Tweety Syndrome. Here's more news

Over the past 30 years, half of around 900 people diagnosed with bird flu around the world have died. Even if the case fatality rate is much lower for this strain of the bird flu, covid showed how devastating a 1% death rate can be when a virus spreads easily.

Ya think soonToBePresident Huey Long 2024^© might notice that death rate? I don't think so either.

As discussed in the ongoing essays on The Greatest Threat, here's another case where not having data allows the bad people to say, 'Well, there isn't hard data available to allow us to take such a costly decision, so we won't. We're not going to spend money and impact commerce on the word of you pointy head science types. The Bible promises that God won't send another plague."

The Greatest Threat - part the sixth

Well... that didn't last long. The Greatest Threat is burying the actual data so that the pols and the populace don't know what the pols are doing. And, most importantly, whether the pols' fiat is good or bad for the populace. And, most importantly, not just the minority that made the fiat happen. Not too surprisingly, one area of general concern is what the results are for the push for abortion bans following the Gang of Six's cockamamie decree to overturn Roe.

New reporting documents that the data is being suppressed!! Who wooda thunk it!! The Evangelical Reactionary Radical Right Wingnuts would never lie about such a thing, would they??

In fact, we found that in a few states, political leaders who backed the bans have stood in the way of measuring their consequences.

We can expect, as dead as a Lame Duck is, that wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024^© will order that all data assembled, created, or distributed by the Damn Gummint must first be approved by the (soon to be created) Office of Data Integrity. You Betcha.

Where seldom is heard a discouraging word, and the skies are not cloudy all day.

And... as one might expect, the quintessence of data suppression is... wait for it... Texas!

When Texas delayed publishing its maternal mortality report in 2022, an election year, then-committee member Nakeenya Wilson, a community advocate, spoke out, saying "withholding data that does not make us look good is dishonorably burying those women."

The next session, Texas lawmakers passed a bill changing the requirements for the position that Wilson held, effectively removing her from the committee. State officials appointed Dr. Ingrid Skop, a Texas OB-GYN who is the vice president of a prominent anti-abortion organization.

The sub-GED crowd should relish their time in the sun. I predict that the Red States will experience significant Brain Drain to the Blue States in less than a generation. Smart people won't stand for this shit.

Fun With Cars

What's that line? "Fun fun fun 'til her daddy takes the T-bird away" Not for the first time, these essays have told the tale of the Evangelical Reactionary Radical Right Wingnuts claiming that global warming/climate change/Mother Nature's having Her revenge is all a Hoax from the Woke Blue People? And that, the Private Sector, aka the home insurance companies, are the instrument not the Damn Gummint. Of course, not the Damn Gummint because the Evangelical Reactionary Radical Right Wingnuts control enough of it from DC down to the Shitburg Town Councils of the Red States to block any efforts to at least slow down the process. In no way is The Insurance Industrial Complex^™ going to wait. They're taking her daddy's house insurance away with vigor. The science is not complete to answer the vital question: have we run past the point of no return. The Musk Ox and his wimins may have to get a move on to Mars to re-populate another planet.

Well, here's yet another report on the inevitable. The Insurance Industrial Complex^™ doesn't believe in the Bible or the Torah or the Koran, just Greenbacks. And when the flow of Greenbacks starts to reverse course, it responds with a vengeance. As well it might.

The Treasury Department under President Biden laid the groundwork to gather data about climate change's effects on the insurance market, then backed off in the face of pressure from states and insurers, as my colleague Emily Flitter reported this year. But the incoming Trump administration could be pressured to intervene, especially since some of the highest premium increases are in states that he carried in November.

Ah, yes. And, most importantly, fiddle a way to put the financial onus on Blue States. We can never forget The Prime Directive.

Here is the map.

Ya don't get away with messing with the Insurance Industrial Complex^™'s rice bowl.

Buyer's Remorse?

Well... all those sub-GED shitkickers are about to get a barge pole up their butt (partial paywalled). They'll likely follow Garfield 2.0's command and blame Sleepy Joe for the betrayal. Or may be not so much. May be they'll figure out they were duped.

Agricultural producers could face worse losses than any other economic sector from Trump's plans to impose sweeping tariffs on imports and to undertake what he frequently has called "the largest domestic deportation operation" of undocumented immigrants "in American history." Hospitals and other health providers in rural areas could face the greatest strain from proposals Trump has embraced to slash spending on Medicaid, which provides coverage to a greater share of adults in smaller communities than in large metropolitan areas. And small-town public schools would likely be destabilized even more than urban school districts if Trump succeeds in his pledge to expand "school choice" by providing parents with vouchers to send their kids to private schools.

Once again, the Evangelical Reactionary Radical Right Wingnuts seek to govern not on real policy 'for the people', but culture war. "I didn't get no big city woke book larnin, and I'll be damned if my kids know more than I do. Book larnin never did me no good, anyway and it'll just turn my kids agin me and mine. Schools that just teach the larnin of the Bible, now that'd be good." How much of modern economy came from the shitkickers? Less than zero. Fun fact: bin Laden ran 9/11 with satellite phones. Ya need the modernest tech to take The People back to the 7th century. Or the 1st. Ya should only live as long as God says you should. We don't need no hospitals. And so forth.

Now, the question is: is Brownstein right? Will the MAGAnauts feel the harsh lash of the whip? Likely not. If for no other reason that Garfield 2.0 and his cabal will make sure that the negative impact of these various decisions don't happen in Red Counties. The tariff scam being first among many. Garfield 2.0 can exempt industries/companies as he wishes, and he will. Last time he gave away on the order of $60 billion to his beloved farmers to offset the tariffs. I don't think he's forgotten that bit. Will he and his worry about being shamed by the obvious fact that he'll be targeting Blue states? Not a bit; that's the point. Will the Blue states rise up and throw the bastards out in '26? One can only hope.

On the whole, the whole point of this retribution is to make the Blue States pay for opposing him. There's no reason to doubt he's had second thoughts. Or any thought at all, of course. Reptiles have such meager brains.

Thought For The Day - 11 December 2024

Well... further proof that the USofA would be better off if it had had an FBI director with stones swinging in his BVDs rather than cotton candy.

Two For The Show

Once again, a two-fer from the NYT. First, how the Brits are facing The Greatest Threat, although not due, according to the report, nefarious action by the Damn Gummint. In sum: without accurate data, government administration turns into: 'it is just my opinion that counts'.

An essential ingredient in economic policymaking, from interest rates to government spending, is reliable data. But government officials, economists and other number crunchers in Britain are expressing deepening concern over a long-running issue with a data set used to understand a crucial area: the country's jobs market.

Well... no shit, Sherlock. At least the Brits are taking the situation seriously, rather than creating the mess on purpose to just destroy governance. Not the same as Garfield 2.0's clear intent.

And, second, we have more support for the private sector taking climate change seriously. After all, climate change is affecting profit, that All American Ideal.

Historically, officials at Fannie and Freddie have banked on their mortgage portfolio's being diversified across so many markets that even when delinquencies and defaults spike after disasters, they wouldn't cause significant losses.

What was the mantra leading up to The Great Recession, fueled by ARMS and CDS via Blythe Masters? Oh yeah, the whole country can't go into housing collapse. How did that assumption work out?

"We cannot change the fact that in Florida we have hurricanes, so we shouldn't be penalized for it," Mr. Diaz said, noting that high insurance costs were already pushing prospective buyers to less popular submarkets. œ"This is why we have the federal government."

Ah, now the MAGAnaut ox is being gored. "Uncle Sugar has to rescue us!!!"

I Have it on Good Authority

Way back in the dark ages, I spent some years working for Optimed Medical Systems, which purveyed a medical prior authorization system written in Progress (not at all relational) database and language suite. This was the early 1990s. The point being, of course, that computerized PA moats have been around for decades. In fact, the OMS software was sorta, kinda an implementation of the Milliman & Robertson books in use for some time. The only thing that's really changed today is that the Medical Industrial Complex has leveraged lots more compute and data than was available 30 years ago. And things are so much better now for the unhealthy.

In 1998 (using 1996 data), this is what the Annals of Surgery thought of M&R Guidelines

Many of the M&R guidelines were found to be at wide variance from the actual length of stay of patients treated for these diseases in North Carolina. For many patients, the M&R guidelines are not applicable. Applying them in an uninformed way--in other words, discharging patients from the hospital too early--may hurt some patients.

Yeah, patients are so much better off with PA moats. "Stop cutting!! The gas passer's time is up!" The Medical Industrial Complex now has a smorgasbord of choice for denying healthcare.

Thought For The Day - 6 December 2024

Yeah, I guess it's true that Bidenomics is a complete failure.

US job growth surged in November, adding 227,000 jobs

Of course, Garfield 2.0 will fuck it up. And place the blame on Sleepy Joe. Remember what I've said about The Greatest Threat? Garfield 2.0 will order BLS/Census to 'revise' down, steeply, the employment data for 2024 (at least). And order same to only produce rosy data while he's still around. I guarantee it. The Gang of Six^© has said he can order anyone in the Damn Gummint to do what he says.

Judges Make Law

The Evangelical Reactionary Radical Right Wingnuts continually bleat that judges, liberals and progressives, are always 'making law' that should be done by legislatures, preferably in Red States. So now we have transgender status before the The Gang of Six^©. And, as one might expect from the righteous and God fearing, Roberts et al claim no jurisdiction.

We might think that we can do just as good a job with respect to the evidence here as Tennessee or anybody else, but my understanding is that the Constitution leaves that question to the people's representatives rather than to nine people, none of whom is a doctor.
-- Roberts

As if hillybilly part-time legislators in those wonderful Red States are? There are 10 states with full-time legislatures, and only one might be sort of Red, Ohio. The rest just show up every now and again after walking behind their mule plow. Since when does being a politician make one expert on each and every technical nuance of human life? Well, the Garfield 2.0 and his mob consider themselves to be such experts. Better than the actually trained and experienced ones on Earth One. Damn Deep State educated elites. "Ever ting I no or need to no I gots from ma Bible!1"

So, how many qualified physicians are there in DC? Enquiring minds need to know. According to the wiki page, only 3 could possibly be qualified to be 'expert' on the nuance of childhood transgender issues. That's it.

[Y]ou could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.
-- Hillary Clinton/2016

Damn right.

JAMA actually did the count at the state level, for 2022: 86 of 7552. We don't know how many of them are just country sawbones fixing gunshot wounds.

Past is Prologue - part the second

For those who haven't read American history for a while, if ever, here's a taste of what we can expect from Garfield 2.0 and the Evangelical Reactionary Radical Right Wingnuts. Enjoy.

Williams founded the first place in modern history where citizenship and religion were separate, providing religious liberty and separation of church and state. This was combined with the principle of majoritarian democracy.

The Evangelical Reactionary Radical Right Wingnuts will put a stop to that.

The Greatest Threat - part the fifth

Today's reporting shows another example of what Science and Smarts we'll likely lose on 20 Jan. It's a report on NOAA's efforts to map the ocean's degree of warming from climate change. It is a full page, "with 8-by-ten10 glossy photos with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back" story. Herewith the punch line:

A decade ago, sea surface temperatures in the Pacific shot up to 11 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than normal. A high pressure system parked over the ocean, and winds that churn cold, nutrient-rich water from the depths to the surface died down. Stagnant, warm water spread across the Northeast Pacific, in a marine heat wave that lasted for three years.

Under the surface, the food web broke down and ecosystems convulsed, at first unseen to humans on shore. But soon, clues washed up.

You can bet your sweet bippy that such a report will never again leave NOAA, if it even still exists.